[2] Salzman grew up in Ridgefield, Connecticut, the oldest child of a piano teacher mother and a social worker father.
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude in 1982 and spent the next two years in Changsha, Hunan, teaching English at Hunan Medical College [zh] and studying martial arts with Pan Qingfu, a Chinese martial arts teacher and kung fu movie actor.
In 2011 he presented a multimedia monologue, An Atheist in Freefall, at the New York Public Library as part of the exhibition Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
The most recent is his 2012 memoir, The Man in the Empty Boat, about his search for equanimity after personal catastrophes, which included his sister's untimely death and his own nervous breakdown.
[6][7] Common to his later works is a theme of struggling to reach an ideal but falling short, and the quiet changes within a person who faces the possibility of never achieving their goal.