A Writer's Life by Gay Talese

A Writer's Life by Gay Talese

The inner workings of a writer's life, the interplay between experience and writing, are brilliantly recounted by a master of the art. Gay Talese now focuses on his own life--the zeal for the truth, the narrative edge, the sometimes startling precision, that won accolades for his journalism and best-sellerdom and acclaim for his revelatory books about The New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power), the Mafia (Honor Thy Father), the sex industry (Thy Neighbor's Wife), and, focusing on his own family, the American immigrant experience (Unto the Sons).

How has Talese found his subjects? What has stimulated, blocked, or inspired his writing? Here are his amateur beginnings on his college newspaper; his professional climb at The New York Times; his desire to write on a larger canvas, which led him to magazine writing at Esquire and then to books. We see his involvement with issues of race from his student days in the Deep South to a recent interracial wedding in Selma, Alabama, where he once covered the fierce struggle for civil rights. Here are his reflections on the changing American sexual mores he has written about over the last fifty years, and a striking look at the lives--and their meaning--of Lorena and John Bobbitt. He takes us behind the scenes of his legendary profile of Frank Sinatra, his writings about Joe DiMaggio and heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, and his interview with the head of a Mafia family.

But he is at his most poignant in talking about the ordinary men and women whose stories led to his most memorable work. In remarkable fashion, he traces the history of a single restaurant location in New York, creating an ethnic mosaic of one restaurateur after the other whose dreams were dashed while a successor's were born. And as he delves into the life of a young female Chinese soccer player, we see his consuming interest in the world in its latest manifestation.

In these and other recollections and stories, Talese gives us a fascinating picture of both the serendipity and meticulousness involved in getting a story. He makes clear that every one of us represents a good one, if a writer has the curiosity to know it, the diligence to pursue it, and the desire to get it right.

Candid, humorous, deeply impassioned--a dazzling book about the nature of writing in one man's life, and of writing itself.

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	9780679410966
ISBN 10	0679410961
Title	A Writer's Life
Author	Gay Talese
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Year published	2006-04-25
Number of pages	448
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.