Gay Talese
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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.
Talese is a visiting writer at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California each spring.
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[edit] Bio
Talese was born into an 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 decent.
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".
[edit] Origins of a Writer
His entree 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 over-heard 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."
[edit] College
Perhaps reflecting the still pervasive bigotry at many universities of the era, Talese was rejected by dozens of colleges in New Jersey and surrounding states. He eventually was accepted at the University of Alabama, where his selection of a major was a pretty 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."
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:
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 is 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 that did not attain the glory of winning and less so in hero-worshipping the winners.
[edit] Professional career
[edit] Journalism - Reporter
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.
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.
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."
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 this, he would be rewarded with a promotion to the Albany Bureau to cover state politics. Yet, it was a short-lived assignment as Talese 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.".
[edit] 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.
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.
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."
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.
[edit] In popular culture
Gay Talese appeared in several strips of the comic Doonesbury, profiling journalist Rick Redfern and nearly driving him crazy with incessant questions.
[edit] 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)
