The Voyeur's Motel by Gay Talese
On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of his landmark bestseller Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay Talese received an anonymous handwritten letter from a man in Colorado. Since learning of your long-awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America, the letter began, I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book. The man went on to tell Talese an astonishing secret: he had bought a motel outside Denver to satisfy his voyeuristic desires. Underneath the roof of his motel, the man had built an observation platform, fitted with vents, through which he could watch his unwitting guests. Unsure what to make of this confession, Talese traveled to Colorado where he met the man--Gerald Foos--and verified his story in person. But because Foos insisted on remaining anonymous, preserving for himself the privacy he denied his guests, Talese filed his reporting away, assuming the story would remain untold. Over the ensuing years, Foos occasionally reached out to Talese to fill him in on the latest developments in his life. He also sent Talese hundreds of pages of notes on his guests and their habits, work that Foos believed made him a pioneering researcher into American society and sexuality. America in microcosm had passed through the Voyeur's motel, and he witnessed and recorded the harsh effects of the war in Vietnam, the upheaval in gender roles, the decline of segregation, and much more. But Foos continued to insist on anonymity. Now, after thirty-five years, he's ready to go public and Gay Talese can finally tell his story. The Voyeur's Motel is an extraordinary work of narrative journalism, at once a portrait of one complicated man, and an examination of secret lives and shifting mores in a culturally-evolving country.Gay Talese was born to Italian immigrant parents in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 1932. He went to the University of Alabama and was hired as a copyboy at the New York Times following graduation. Talese returned to the New York Times in 1956 after a brief tour in the army. Since then, he's contributed to Esquire, the New Yorker, Newsweek, and Harper's Magazine, among others. These stories led Tom Wolfe to credit Gay Talese with the invention of The New Journalism, a creative type of nonfiction writing.
Talese's best-selling works have covered topics such as the New York Times' history and influence (The Kingdom and the Power); the inner story of a Mafia family (Honor Thy Father); his father's immigration to America from Italy in the years leading up to World War II (Unto the Sons); and the shifting moral ideals of America in the years leading up to the AIDS epidemic (Thy Neighbor's Wife). Gay Talese resides in New York City with his wife, Nan.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780802125811 |
| ISBN 10 | 0802125816 |
| Title | The Voyeur's Motel |
| Author | Gay Talese |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press |
| Year published | 2016-07-12 |
| Number of pages | 240 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |