Only America seems able to produce writers whose careers are as unconventional and whose talents are as diverse as James Sallis, who died on Tuesday, January 27, in Phoenix, Arizona, at the age of 81. Sallis was a novelist, short story writer, poet, translator (from French, Russian and Spanish), creative writing professor and literary critic. He also worked as a neonatal respiratory therapist, musician (playing guitar, mandolin, banjo and bouzouki) and as a screenwriter.
Born in Arkansas in 1944, Sallis lived in Louisiana, Iowa, London, New York, Paris and Arizona, gathering a wealth of experience that continually shaped his work. Marked by existentialism, his writing used crimes – whether to be solved or committed – as a way to explore human solitude and the feeling of loss, all set to a jazz rhythm in semi-dreamlike atmospheres. The film adaptation of his most electrifying book, Drive (2005), directed by Nicolas Winding Refn in 2011, brought him late-in-life fame that his readers had hoped for since his debut novel, 1992’s The Long-Legged Fly.
Sallis’s childhood in the segregated South, where he was forbidden to play with Black children, left a lasting impact. He grew up in a working-class family in a home without books, discovering literature first through science fiction. This is the genre in which he began his career, while also starting to write poetry. Sallis would later explain that science fiction shaped his worldview, while poetry structured his relationship to language and encouraged him to be concise.
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