However, he was always able to find a redeeming quality, a misconception about them that he sought to amend or a dark vein to shed some light on. He has written about gangsters, pornographers and other people who are disapproved of and censored by society. Talese, difference between curiosity and "snooping" he never wrote about anyone for whom he did not feel a considerable degree of respect or admiration.
Stories that were not considered news a priori, secondary actors who nevertheless have much to tell and from whom there is much to learn. This curious and s hy journalism student preferred to know the story of the losers, the outcasts, the forgotten. Gay Talese, Origins of a Non-Fiction Writer, 1996. If I wrote with more compassion about the losers than the winners in my sports writing days, it was because I found the stories of the losers more interesting, an opinion I retained long after I left the Alabama campus. "When I became sports editor of the college newspaper in my junior year, I used my position to describe the desperation of the 'infidelder' whose deflected shot meant defeat, or the basketball player who savoured the action only when there was a fight, and many other unlucky characters on the margins of the sports field. Bulger" at the Dolby Theatre 88 on Jin New York City AP/ROB KIM - Gay Talese attends the premiere of "Whitey:United States Of America V. In his university days, the tendency of professors towards a conservative and reliable reporting style did not appeal to him much, he preferred the influence of the realistic fiction writers he admired such as John Cheever, Raymond Carver or Joyce Carol Oates. One of her first journalistic milestones was a moving article about a pet cemetery outside Atlantic City that got published in the city's newspaper, the Atlantic City Press.Įven at the beginning, the reports of a young aspiring writer showed an unusual interest in stories that go unnoticed by other people because of their "ordinariness" and apparent news irrelevance.Īfter trying to get into several universities and being rejected by most of them, he managed to get admission to study journalism at the University of Alabama. Talese began her journalistic career as a teenager, writing sports stories about high school baseball games for the school newspaper, as well as a column devoted to high school events. AP/EVAN AGOSTINI - Gay writer Talese attends the PEN 2018 Literary Gala at the American Museum of Natural History on Tuesday in New York "The shop was like a talk show that developed around my mother's friendly attitude and timely questions. It was precisely from her that he learned many of the skills he would later use in his interviews. The clientele, taking advantage of the intimacy of the screen, entrusted their most secret intimacies to his mother. Also, it was in the tailor's shop where, behind the counters, he used to stop and listen to the private lives, events and misfortunes of the local bourgeoisie. Of Italian descent, his father was an emigrant from the Calabria region and his mother an Italian-American, he spent his childhood as an errand boy in the tailor's shop run by his family.Ĭoming from a family of tailors, he developed a special sensitivity for good taste and elegance from a very young age. Gay Talese was born on Februin Ocean City, a small city on the east coast of the state of New Jersey.