Gay Talese

Gay Talese (born February 7, 1932) is an American author. He wrote for The New York Times in the early 1960s and helped to define literary journalism or "new nonfiction reportage", also known as New Journalism. His two most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra. Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixel Image in higher resolution (2048 × 1536 pixel, file size: 646 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) The author of this image is me, David Shankbone. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixel Image in higher resolution (2048 × 1536 pixel, file size: 646 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) The author of this image is me, David Shankbone. ... is the 38th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1932 (MCMXXXII) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link will display full 1932 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed internationally. ... New Journalism was the name given to a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Sinatra redirects here. ...

Talese is a visiting writer at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California each spring. The Master of Professional Writing Program (referred to as MPW) is a prestigious graduate writing program which offers a variety of courses at the University of Southern Californias College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. ... The Trojan Shrine, better known as Tommy Trojan located in the center of University of Southern California campus. ...

Biography

Talese was born into a Roman Catholic Italian-American family in Ocean City, located just south of Atlantic City. His southern Italian father, Joseph Talese, was a tailor who had emigrated to the United States in 1922 and his mother, the former Catherine DePaolo, was a buyer for a Brooklyn department store (he is sometimes erroneously identified as being from Brooklyn). From birth, he felt like an outsider because in addition to being Italian on an island populated with Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the only other Roman Catholics were of Irish descent. The Roman Catholic Church, most often spoken of simply as the Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with over one billion members. ... Language(s) American English, Italian, Sicilian, Neapolitan, other (predominantly southern) Italian dialects and languages of Italian historical minorities Religion(s) Roman Catholic An Italian American is an American of Italian descent. ... Ocean City highlighted in Cape May County. ... Alternate meanings: See Atlantic City (disambiguation) Atlantic City is a city located in USA. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 40,517. ... This article is about the English as an ethnic group and nation. ... Protestantism is a general grouping of denominations within Christianity. ...

This was further reinforced when he entered his school years because he wore hand crafted suits from his father's shop which, he later reflected in his memoir Origins of a Nonfiction Writer (1996), caused him to appear to be older than his classmates. He recounted his early years in his book "Unto the Sons".

Talese graduated from Ocean City High School in 1949.^[1] Ocean City High School is a four-year comprehensive public high school located in Ocean City, in Cape May County, New Jersey, United States, as part of the Ocean City School District. ...

He still vacations in Ocean City where most of his immediate family still resides. To his great nieces and nephews he is known as Uncle Gay and he has always treated them with a little present whenever they come to his Ocean City home.

Origins of a writer

His entry into writing was entirely happenstance and the unintended consequence of the then high school sophomore's attempt to gain more playing time on the baseball team. The assistant coach had the duty of calling in the chronicle of each game to the local newspaper and when he complained he was too busy to take care of it, the head coach turned to Talese to take over the duties. As he recalls in Origins,

"On the mistaken assumption that relieving the athletic department of its press duties would gain me the gratitude of the coach and get me more playing time, I took the job and even embellished it by using my typing skills to compose my own account of the games rather than merely relaying the information to the newspapers by telephone."

No matter how random this beginning, Talese soon showed he was no ordinary 15 year old high school reporter. He quickly (after only seven sports articles) was given the job of covering not only the goings-on at the school, but also given his own column for the weekly Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger. By the time he left for college in September 1949, Talese had written some 311 stories and columns for the Sentinel-Ledger.

Talese credits his mother as the role model he followed in developing the interviewing techniques that would serve him so well later in life interviewing such varied subjects as mafia members and middle-class Americans on their sexual habits. He relates in Origins:

"I learned [from my mother] . . . to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt even when people were having great difficulty in explaining themselves, for during such halting and imprecise moments . . . people are very revealing--what they hesitate to talk about can tell much about them. Their pauses, their evasions, their sudden shifts in subject matter are likely indicators of what embarrasses them, or irritates them, or what they regard as too private or imprudent to be disclosed to another person at that particular time. However, I have also overheard many people discussing candidly with my mother what they had earlier avoided--a reaction that I think had less to do with her inquiring nature or sensitively posed questions than with their gradual acceptance of her as a trustworthy individual in whom they could confide."

College

Perhaps reflecting the still pervasive bigotry at many universities of the era, Talese was rejected by dozens of colleges in New Jersey and nearby states. He eventually was accepted at the University of Alabama, where his selection of a major was, as he described it, a moot choice. "I chose journalism as my college major because that is what I knew," he recalls, "but I really became a student of history." The University of Alabama (also known as Alabama, UA or colloquially as Bama) is a public coeducational university located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA. Founded in 1831, UA is the flagship campus of the University of Alabama System. ...

It was here that he would begin to employ literary devices more well known in fiction, like establishing the "scene" with minute details and beginning articles in medias res (Latin for "in the midst of things"). In his junior year, he became the sports editor for the campus newspaper, Crimson-White, and started a column he dubbed "Sports Gay-zing." For a column entitled "Sports Gay-zing" ("Crimson-White" November 7, 195l) he wrote: In medias res, also medias in res (Latin for into the middle of things) is a literary and artistic technique where the narrative starts in the middle of the story instead of from its beginning (ab ovo or ab initio). ...

Rhythmic "Sixty Minute Man" emanated from the Supe Store juke box and Larry (The Maestro) Chiodetti beat against the table like mad in keeping time with the jumpy tempo. T-shirted Bobby Marlow was just leaving the Sunday morning bull session and dapper Bill Kilroy had just purchased the morning newspapers.

This was before Lillian Ross did the same in Picture (1952) or Truman Capote used the technique in The Muses are Heard (1956). More importantly, Talese included among his subjects both the "losers" and the unnoticed. He was more interested in those who did not attain the glory of winning and less so in hero-worshipping the winners. Lillian Ross (born June 8, 1927) is an American journalist and author who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1949. ... Truman Capote (pronounced ) (30 September 1924 – 25 August 1984) was an American writer whose non-fiction, stories, novels and plays are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffanys (1958) and In Cold Blood (1965), which he labeled a non-fiction novel. ...

Professional career

Journalism - reporter

Talese at home in 2007

Wikinews has related news:

Gay Talese on the state of journalism, Iraq and his life

After graduating in June 1953, he moved to New York City yet could only find work as a copyboy. The job was, however, at the esteemed New York Times and he showed up for his mundane position nevertheless in handstitched Italian suits. He eventually was able to get an article published in the Times, albeit unsigned (without credit). In "Times Square Anniversary" (November 2, 1953), he interviewed the man who was responsible for running the headlines that flash across the famous marquee above Times Square. Image File history File links Metadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (3264 × 2448 pixels, file size: 6. ... Image File history File links Metadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (3264 × 2448 pixels, file size: 6. ... Image File history File links WikiNews-Logo. ... Wikinews is a free-content news source and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. ... New York, New York and NYC redirect here. ... Look up Gofer in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The New York Times is an internationally known daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed in the United States and many other nations worldwide. ... For other uses, see Times Square (disambiguation). ...

He followed this with an article in the February 21, 1954 edition concerning the chairs used on the boardwalk of Atlantic City (something he was familiar with as his home town of Ocean City is the next hamlet south of the gambling mecca). Yet, his budding journalism career would have to be put on haitus - Talese was drafted into the United States Army in 1954. Photograph of the boardwalk in Atlantic City, NJ, USA, taken August 2003. ...

While at the University of Alabama, he had been required (as all male students were at the time owing to the ongoing Korean War conflict) to join the Reserved Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and had moved to New York awaiting his eventual commission as a second lieutenant. He was sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to train in the Tank Corps. His mechanical skills found lacking, he was transferred to the Office of Public Information where he found himself once again working for the local paper, Inside the Turret, and once again soon had his own column, "Fort Knox Confidential." Combatants United Nations:  Republic of Korea,  Australia,  Belgium,  Luxembourg,  Canada,  Colombia,  Ethiopia,  France,  Greece,  Luxembourg,  Netherlands,  New Zealand,  Philippines,  South Africa,  Thailand,  Turkey,  United Kingdom,  United States Medical staff:  Denmark,  Australia,  Italy,  Norway,  Sweden Communist states:  Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,  Peoples Republic of China,  Soviet Union Commanders... Second Lieutenant is the lowest commissioned rank in many armed forces. ... This article is about United States Army post. ...

Keeping in touch with his former employers at the Times, when Talese completed his military obligation in 1956 he returned to New York as a full-fledged sports reporter. As he would later opine, "Sports is about people who lose and lose and lose. They lose games; then they lose their jobs. It can be very intriguing." Of the various fields, boxing held the most appeal for Talese, undoubtably because it was about individuals engaged in contests and those individuals in the mid to late 1950s were becoming predominately non-white at the prize-fight level. He would write 38 articles about Floyd Patterson alone. For other senses of these words, see boxing (disambiguation) or boxer (disambiguation). ... Floyd Patterson (January 4, 1935 – May 11, 2006) was an American heavyweight boxing champion. ...

For this, he would be rewarded with a promotion to the Albany Bureau to cover state politics. It was a short-lived assignment, however, as Talese's exacting habits and meticulous style soon irritated his new editors to the point that they recalled him to the city, assigning him to write minor obituaries. He puts it, "I was banished to the obituary desk as punishment--to break me. There were major obituaries and minor obituaries. I was sent to write minor obituaries not even seven paragraphs long."

Journalism - essayist

After a year doing penance in the Times obituary section, he began to write articles for the Sunday Times which was run as a separate organization from the daily Times by editor Lester Markel. From this new start, Talese would rise to become one of the country's foremost essayists and a leading practitioner of New Journalism. New Journalism was the name given to a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. ...

Talese wrote "The Bridge" (1964, Harper & Row, New York, NY). This reporter-style, non-fiction book depicted the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City. Talese's 1966 Esquire Magazine article on Frank Sinatra, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," is one of the most influential American magazine articles of all time. With what some have called a brilliant structure and pacing, the article focused not just on Sinatra himself, but also on Talese's pursuit of his subject. Esquire is a magazine for men owned by the Hearst Corporation. ... Sinatra redirects here. ... The cover to Gay Taleses profile. ...

After this piece, many magazine editors tacitly accepted the writer's technique of writing about the creating and compiling of the story itself, rather than simply writing about the subject. Other editors even encouraged the technique.

Talese also published his celebrated Esquire Magazine piece about Joe DiMaggio in 1966, The Silent Season of a Hero, which is also a meditation on the transient nature of fame. When a number of Esquire pieces were collected into a book called Fame and Obscurity Talese paid tribute in its introduction to two writers he admired and mentioned "an aspiration on my part to somehow bring to reportage the tone that Irwin Shaw and John O'Hara had brought to the short story." Irwin Shaw (né Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff, February 27, 1913 - May 16, 1984) was an American Jewish playwright, screen writer and author. ... John Henry OHara (31 January 1905 – 11 April 1970) was an American writer. ...

Talese wrote "Honor Thy Father" (1971, Ballantine Books), which was made into a feature film. He also released a memoir in 2006, A Writer's Life, but it was critically less well received.

Talese, an Italian American, is married to Nan Talese, a New York editor and a veteran of the publishing industry, who is perhaps best known outside the industry for her appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show with author James Frey, whose controversial memoir of addiction of A Million Little Pieces was published by her imprint Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. Gay and Nan Talese's marriage will be the subject of Talese's next book, the third in a series published by Knopf.^[2] The first two books, "Unto the Sons" and "A Writer's Life," were published in 1992 and 2007, respectively. An Italian-American is an American of Italian descent either born in America or someone who has immigrated. ... Nan Talese is an American editor and a veteran of the New York publishing industry. ... Oprah Winfrey, (born January 29, 1954) is a multiple-Emmy Award winning host of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the highest rated talk show in television history. ... James Christopher Frey (born September 12, 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio USA) is an American writer. ... A Million Little Pieces is a partially-fabricated[1] memoir by James Frey. ... Alfred A. Knopf ( September 12, 1892 – August 11, 1984) was a leading American publisher of the 20th century. ...

In popular culture

Gay Talese appeared in several strips of the comic Doonesbury, giving an interview to radio host Mark Slackmeyer to promote his book "Thy Neighbor's Wife." Doonesbury is a comic strip by Garry Trudeau, popular in the United States and other parts of the world. ...

Bibliography

• A Writer's Life (2006)
• Origins of a Nonfiction Writer (1996)
• Unto the Sons (1992)
• Thy Neighbor's Wife (1981)
• Honor Thy Father (1971, Ballantine Books)
• Fame and Obscurity (1970)
• The Kingdom and the Power (1969)

Thy Neighbors Wife is documentary book by Gay Talese, published in 1981. ...

References

The Star-Ledger is the leading newspaper in New Jersey. ... is the 178th day of the year (179th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... This article is about the year. ... is the 216th day of the year (217th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... ABC News is a division of ABC television and radio networks (ABC), owned by The Walt Disney Company. ... is the 222nd day of the year (223rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 222nd day of the year (223rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ...

External links

• Official site
• 1992 audio interview with Gay Talese by Don Swaim at Wired for Books.