"Writing is often like driving a truck at night without headlights,
losingyour way along the road, and spending a decade in a ditch."
Gay Talese was born February 7, 1932, on the small island of Ocean City, New Jersey, a resort town just south of Atlantic City. The lives of his parents, Joseph Talese, a southern Italian tailor who immigrated to America in 1922, and Catherine DePaolo, a buyer for a Brooklyn department store, are chronicled in Unto the Sons, Talese's memoir and history of Italian immigration to America. In "Origins of a Nonfiction Writer", Talese writes that he comes "from an island and a family that reinforced my identity as a marginal American, an outsider, an alien in my native nation" . Talese was a minority within a minority, for he was an Italian-American Catholic in an Irish Catholic parish on a Protestant dominated island. Always a lover of history, he soon learned that his island home had been founded as a religious retreat in 1879 by Methodist ministers who wished "to secure the presence of God on the beach, to shade the summer from the corrupting exposure of the flesh, and to eliminate the temptations of alcohol and other evil spirits they saw swirling around them as freely as the mosquitoes from the nearby marshes". Talese's later exploration of "forbidden" subjects in such works as Honor Thy Father and Thy Neighbor's Wife is rooted in his rebellion against his island's prohibitions.
Talese also wrote for the New York Times in the early 1960s, and experimented with literary journalism or "new nonfiction reportage", also known as New Journalism. He is known for his daring pursuit of "unreportable" stories, for his exhaustive research, and for his formally elegant style. Talese is currently on faculty at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.
His Esquire Magazine article "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" is considered one of the most influential magazine articles of all time, in that it focused not just on Sinatra but on Talese's pursuit of his subject.
Talese's newest work is his autobiography, A Writer's Life.
• New York: A Serendipiter's Journey (1961)
• The Bridge: The Building of the Verranzano-Narrows Bridge (1964)
