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Gay Talese

American writer (born 1932)

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Early life and education

Talese, who is of Italian heritage, was born in Ocean City, New Jersey. His father, Joseph Talese, was a tailor who had emigrated to the United States in 1922 from Maida, a small town in the province of Catanzaro, in the region of Calabria in southern Italy. His mother, the former Catherine DePaolo, was born in Brooklyn to parents who had emigrated from the same area in southern Italy, and worked as a buyer for a Brooklyn department store. At school as a child, Talese wore hand-crafted suits from his father's shop which, he later speculated in his memoir, Origins of a Nonfiction Writer (1996), caused him to seem older than his classmates. Talese recounted his early years in his book Unto the Sons.

Talese graduated from Ocean City High School in 1949. Screenwriter and author Nicholas Pileggi is his first cousin.

Talese's entry into writing was entirely coincidental and an unintentional consequence of his attempt as a high school sophomore to gain more playing time on the baseball team. The assistant coach had the duty of telephoning in the chronicle of each game to the local newspaper and when he complained he was too busy to do it properly, the head coach gave Talese the duty. As he recalls in his 1996 memoiristic essay "Origins of a Nonfiction Writer":

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.

After only seven sports articles, Talese was given his own column for the weekly Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger in Ocean City. By the time he left for college in September 1949, he 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 he would use during his career. He relates in "Origins of a Nonfiction Writer":

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.

Talese graduated from the University of Alabama in 1953. 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." At university, he became a brother of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity.

It was there that Talese would begin to employ literary devices more well known for fiction, such as establishing the "scene" with minute details and beginning articles in medias res. During his junior year, he became the sports editor for the campus newspaper, The Crimson White, and started a column he dubbed "Sports Gay-zing", for which he wrote on November 7, 1951:

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.

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