 Tom Wolfe dubbed Gay Talese the founder of the New Journalism, but Talese himself has always been uneasy with the label. It isn't difficult to understand why. His style doesn't have the rhetorical braggadocio of Tom Wolfe's or Hunter S. Thompson's. Wolfe's and Thompson's principal contributions were amped-up, flamboyant adventures—producing a distorted, if amusing, view of the world—while Talese's legacy is more purely journalistic. Talese represents a parallel tradition within the New Journalism. His legacy is twofold. First, he is the indefatigable reporter whose books and articles are the product of extensive research. Second, he is the poet of the commonplace, the writer who demonstrated that one could write great literary nonfiction about the "ordinary"— whether ordinary people who discover themselves in extraordinary circumstances, or the ordinary lives of extraordinary people. If the aim of most New Journalism is to write so vividly and report in such intense bursts that a scene leaps from the page, Talese goes in the other direction. He slowly drills down through the mundane subterranean reality of human existence to its "fictional" core. "I believe that if you go deep enough into characters they become so real that their stories feel like make-believe. They feel like fiction. I want to evoke the fictional current that flows beneath the stream of reality," he says. Talese was born in 1932 to Catherine DePaolo and Joseph Talese, an Italian tailor who immigrated to America and settled in Ocean City, New Jersey. Talese was the sports editor of The Crimson White at the University of Alabama, and was hired as a copy boy by The New York Times in 1953 Talese wrote wrote two books in the nine years he worked there: New York: A Serendipiter's Journey (1961) and The Bridge (1964), about the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. At magazines like Esquire, Talese found he could experiment at greater length than at the Times. He wrote a series of pieces for Esquire —now famous profiles, collected in Fame and Obscurity (1970). His 1966 article "The Kingdoms, the Powers, and the Glories of The New York Times" convinced him that a larger book, a "human history" of the paper was worth writing, and The Kingdom and the Power (1969) was a surprise hit. Honor Thy Father (1971) told the story of Bill Bonanno, the son of Mafia boss Joe Bonanno. His "fly on the wall" approach was put to the test by the fact that during the six years Talese followed Bonanno, there were long periods when his father was in hiding and Bonanno Jr. was the target of Mafia hitmen. Talese's most notorious book was Thy Neighbor's Wife (1980), a study of sexuality in America. While reporting it Talese managed two massage parlors, and lived at a nudist commune in California. In 1991, Knopf paid Talese $7 million for his next three books. Unto the Sons (1992), the first volume, traces Talese's family name back to the fourteenth century. In the second volume, Talese is revisiting all his stories—the Verrazano Bridge, The New York Times, the Mafia, American sexuality. As he told the New York Daily News: "My story is always escaping to other people."  |
