When American author James Salter wrote his novel A Sport and a Pastime in 1967, publishers thought it contained more than the "normal amount of sex" and held it "like it was a pair of dirty socks".
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Salter, who died on Friday during what has been described as a "gym session" for the 90-year-old in New York State's Sag Harbor, was highly praised for the book when Doubleday was finally persuaded to print it. It went on to great acclaim and is now hailed as a modern American classic and his most famous novel.
Salter's death was described by his wife Kay Eldredge as having happened at a physical therapy session near their Bridgehampton home. She said he had recently agreed to write a memoir of his writing life for publishers Knopf.
While his work was loved by critics and peers, Salter (a pen name he adopted in favour of Horowitz, his birth-name) never achieved huge commercial success.
His first novel, The Hunters (1957) was written while he was still in the Air Force and did well enough for him to resign his commission. Based partly on his experiences in Korea, it was later turned into a film starring Robert Mitchum, though it differed greatly from the novel.
Salter worked briefly as a Hollywood screenwriter and wrote the screenplay for Downhill Racer starring Robert Redford. He also wrote TV documentaries but was not impressed with Hollywood. His last screenplay was commissioned but then rejected by Redford, and it morphed into Salter's 1979 novel Solo Faces.
The New York Times, reporting on his death, described Salter as a "writer's writer", praised by the likes of Richard Ford and John Irving, a man who "wrote slowly, exactingly and, by almost every critic's estimation, beautifully". A Washington Post critic once wrote that he could "when he wants, break your heart with a sentence".
Salter himself was not surprised by his lack of retail capture. "You can't be admitted to the ranks of writers of importance unless you have sales," he once said.
A Sport and a Pastime remains his most famous novel, though it was courted by controversy on its release. The New York Times described it as being "dense with eroticism": It tells the story of an American expatriate student's affair with a young Frenchwoman and their sex acts are recounted by an unreliable narrator, "in a story that has been called, among other things, 'intensely transgressive'."
