selected articles and essays
"Times Square Anniversary", New York Times, November 2, 1953
Gay Talese published his first article (albeit unsigned) in 1953, while working as a copyboy for the New York Times.
"Chronicler of the Century Did it All", New York Post, November 11, 2007
"I have never known a contemporary writer who was more famous and who seemed to be less affected by his fame than Norman Mailer," writes Gay Talese.
"The Scion, the Stitch, and the Wardrobe", Vanity Fair, August 27, 2007
Custom-tailored suits, with their carefully sculpted contours and other personalized details, have become a rarity over the last half-century. Gay Talese, a noted clotheshorse who was named to this year's International Best-Dressed List, bemoans the decline of this intimate craft, which was mastered by several generations of his male ancestors, including his father.
"The Kingdom and the Tower", New York Observer, June 27, 2007
On Thursday, June 21, The New York Times spent its last day at 229 West 43rd Street. Gay Talese, the Times' greatest chronicler and a former reporter there, returned to the gothic newspaper castle that housed Sulzbergers, Adolph S. Ochs' ten-foot grandfather clock, thousands of journalists, massive underground presses that still ooze ink and defined an era of journalism.
"Honor Thy Family", Newsweek, June 25, 2007
Tony Soprano's Mafia family was fictional. Joe Bonanno's was not. Gay Talese reveals what happened to the next generation of the American mob.
"The Silent Season of a Hero", Esquire, July 1966
"It was not quite spring, the silent season before the search for salmon, and the old fishermen of San Francisco were either painting their boats or repairing their nets along the pier or sitting in the sun talking quietly among themselves, watching the tourists come and go, and smiling, now, as a pretty girl paused to take their picture..."
"Frank Sinatra Has A Cold", Esquire, April 1966
In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L. A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra--his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on--and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism--a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction.
"Peter O'Toole on the Ould Sod", Esquire, 1963
[Peter O'Toole] threw his head back, finished his Scotch, then asked
the stewardess for another. Peter O'Toole was sitting in an airplane that one
hour before had left London, where he has long lived in exile, and was flying
to Ireland, his birthplace.
"Looking for Hemingway", Esquire, 1960
Early in the fifties another young generation of American expatriates
in Paris became twenty-six years old, but they were not Sad Young Men, nor
were they Lost; they were the witty, irreverent sons of a conquering nation.
"Honor Thy Talese", New York Observer, April 23, 2006
Here's a tale of the times from long ago: A southern gentleman editor, Turner Catledge, and some distinguished, horny Sulzbergers (excerpted from A Writer's Life).
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