Lecture Topics
A selection of the author's speeches:
- The Art of Hanging Out
Other Areas of Expertise
- Biography and Memoir
- Communications/Media
- History
- Literature and Fiction
Endorsements
"With Gay Talese as our keynote speaker, attendees of The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest shared a sense that they were in the presence of a literary giant. Gay was magnanimous, attending every presentation and talking at length with any attendee who approached him. Gays Saturday night speech about his writing life was eloquent and inspiring. Gay acted as if he wanted to share his literary soul with every writer he encountered at our conference."
- George Getschow
- Writer in Residence
- The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest
More Information
Gay Talese
Ground-Breaking Journalist and Renowned Writer
Base: New York, NY
- Photo: Joyce Tenneson
Gay Talese has been chronicling American life and writing the literature of reality for more than half a century. His career started while he was a high school student in Ocean City, New Jersey, where he was the sports reporter for the town weekly. He took his column to the University of Alabama in 1949, and following his service in the Army, he began work as a reporter at The New York Times in 1956. From 1965, he wrote for Esquire producing some of the finest magazine pieces of his generation, many of which are collected in The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits and Encounters (2003). His piece, ''Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,'' was called by Esquire the finest it ever published. He has profiled many celebrities over the years, but Gay Talese's magazine pieces and books have been primarily concerned with ordinary people: the overlooked non-newsworthy population that is everywhere, but rarely taken into account by journalists and other chroniclers of reality.* His most recent book, A Writer's Life, was published by Knopf in April 2006. It brilliantly recounts the inner workings of this writer's life, the interplay between experience and writing: the art of hanging out as Gay Talese describes his work. Talese delivers many keynote speeches to a variety of groups and is an inspiration to writers published and non-published.
Talese has also written for The New Yorker and four of his books have been best sellers: Unto the Sons (1992), Thy Neighbors Wife (1980), Honor Thy Father (1971), and The Kingdom and the Power (1968).
He has been married for 45 years and he and his wife, Nan Talese, have two daughters.
*From Origins of a Nonfiction Writer in Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality, with Barbara Lounsberry. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1997.
Works by this Speaker
A Writer's Life
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.
From the Hardcover edition.
Unto the Sons
"An Italian ROOTS." The Washington Post Book World
At long last, Gay Talese, one of America's greatest living authors, employs his prodigious storytelling gifts to tell the saga of his own family's emigration to America from Italy in the years preceding World War II. Ultimately it is the story of all immigrant families and the hope and sacrifice that took them from the familiarity of the old world into the mysteries and challenges of the new.
From the Paperback edition.
Thy Neighbor's Wife
"Engrossing and provocative." Library Journal
Bestselling author Gay Talese's exploration into the hidden and changing sex lives of Americans from all walks of life shocked the world when it was first published in 1981. Now considered a classic, this fascinating personal oddysey and revealing public reflection on American sexuality changed the way Americans looked at themselves and one another.
From the Paperback edition.
Honor Thy Father
"Brilliant . . . Indispensable." Los Angeles Times
Here is the story of the rise and fall of the notorious Bonanno crime family of New York as only best-selling author Gay Talese could tell it.
Fame and Obscurity
"Fascinating . . . Poignant." The Wall Street Journal
In this extraordinary work of insight and interviews, bestselling author Gay Talese shares with us the lives of those we don't know and those we might wish we did: Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Manhattan mobsters, Bowery bums, and many others -- fascinating men and women who define our country's spirit and lead us to an understanding of ourselves as a nation.
From the Paperback edition.
The Gay Talese Reader (Walker Books)
As a young reporter for The New York Times, in 1961 Gay Talese published his first book, New YorkA Serendipiters Journey, a series of vignettes and essays that began, New York is a city of things unnoticed. It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars, two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patricks Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on top of the Empire State Building.
Attention to detail and observation of the unnoticed is the hallmark of Gay Taleses writing, and The Gay Talese Reader brings together the best of his essays and classic profiles. This collection opens with New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed, and includes Silent Season of a Hero (about Joe DiMaggio), Ali in Havana, and Looking for Hemingway as well as several other favorite pieces. It also features a previously unpublished article on the infamous case of Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt, and concludes with the autobiographical pieces that are among Taleses finest writings. These works give insight into the progression of a writer at the pinnacle of his craft.
Whether he is detailing the unseen and sometimes quirky world of New York City or profiling Ol Blue Eyes in Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, Talese captures his subjectsbe they famous, infamous, or merely unusualin his own inimitable, elegant fashion. The essays and profiles collected in The Gay Talese Reader are works of art, each carefully crafted to create a portrait of an unforgettable individual, place or moment.
