welcome

Gay Talese is the bestselling author of eleven books. He was a reporter for the New York Times from 1956 to 1965, and since then he has written for the Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and other national publications.

Gay Talese was born in Ocean City, New Jersey, and currently lives in New York City. His groundbreaking article "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" was named the "best story Esquire ever published," and he was credited by Tom Wolfe with the creation of an inventive form of nonfiction writing called "The New Journalism."

His most recent book, A Writer's Life, was published by Knopf in 2006 and reissued in trade paperback by The Random House Publishing Group in July 2007.

from the photo archives

Gore Vidal, Gay Talese, Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer read George Bernard Shaw's "Don Juan in Hell" in a one-night performance benefiting the Actor's Studio — Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, February 15, 1993

Gay Talese as Don Juan — Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, February 15, 1993

Gay Talese with Muhammad Ali — Havana, 1996

Gay Talese with Yogi Berra — Montclair, New Jersey, 2002

new releases

HarperCollins has reissued Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife and Honor Thy Father as part of its series The Timeless Classic. The books are newly updated and include introductions by Peter Hamill (Honor Thy Father) and Katie Roiphe (Thy Neighbor's Wife).

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 acclaim for his revelatory books. Candid, humorous, deeply impassioned — A Writer's Life is a dazzling book about the nature of writing in one man's life, and of writing itself.

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other books by Gay Talese

In this century and the last, most of history's important news stories have been broken by The New York Times. In The Kingdom and the Power, former Times correspondent Gay Talese lays bare the secret internal intrigues at the daily, revealing the stories behind the personalities, rivalries, and scoops at the most influential paper in the world. Regarded as a classic piece of journalism, The Kingdom and the Power is as gripping as a work of fiction and as relevant as today's headlines.

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works in progress*

Gay Talese is progressing with a new book for Knopf, based on his 50-year marriage. It's tentatively scheduled to be released in the fall of 2011. Click here to read New York Magazine's recent profile of Talese, in which he discusses the work.

Talese is assisting in the forthcoming series "Italians in America" that is being overseen by Jeff Bieber of WETA, the PBS affiliate station for Washington, D.C.

Talese is consulting with actor-director Stanley Tucci on the HBO series that will be based on Talese's 1992 bestseller for Knopf Unto the Sons.

*The above projects are handled by Talese's agent, Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

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Click here for print quality images of Gay Talese