Gay Talese
Gay Talese (; born February 7, 1932) is an American author. As a writer for The New York Times and Esquire magazine in the 1960s, he helped to define literary journalism. His most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.
Talese is a visiting writer at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California each spring.
Biography
Gay Talese was born into a Roman Catholic Italian-American family in Ocean City, New Jersey, located just south of Atlantic City. His father, Joseph Talese, was a tailor who had immigrated to the United States in 1922 from Maida, a town in the province of Catanzaro in southern Italy. His mother, the former Catherine DePaolo, was a buyer for a Brooklyn department store (he is sometimes erroneously identified as being from Brooklyn).
At school as a child, he wore hand crafted suits from his father's shop which, he later reflected in his memoir Origins of a Nonfiction Writer (1996), caused him to appear to be older than his classmates. He recounted his early years in his book Unto the Sons.