Gay Talese: An Italian-American Literary Journey

1932

Portrait by William Castello https://www.facebook.com/Wm.J.Castello/

In 1888, Talese’s grandfather, Gaetano, sailed to America in 1889, finding work as a mason in Pennsylvania. He returned to marry but returned to the U.S. without his wife and son Joseph.

His father, Joseph, a 16-year-old tailor’s apprentice from Calabria, came to Ocean City, N.J., eventually starting his tailoring and dry-cleaning operation. He met his wife Catherine at a wedding in Brooklyn, where she lived with her family in Park Slope. When naming their son after his grandfather, Catherine insisted on the Americanized Gay rather than Gaetano.

Growing up during World War II, young Gay learned what it meant to live a double life. Outsiders viewed his dad, Joseph, as a hard-working tailor and a patriot. However, in the privacy of his Ocean City, N.J., home, the old man grieved over relatives fighting for Italy against American troops.

Talese enrolled at the University of Alabama in 1949. Gay Years later, as a journalist and writer, he worked for the New York Times and The New Yorker. His “literary Journalism,” in which non-fiction, the true story is told in a creative fictional manner, captured the reader’s imagination and interest while at the same time furnishing the reader with true and accurate facts.

In interviews, Gay Talese speaks about Italian Americans at the beginning of the 19th Century and how they did not have “a tradition of writing novels. How their poor language skills turned them “mute.” Unlike the Jewish and Irish, it took at least a generation to break the Italian culture of “silence” that they brought with them, which hindered their talking and writing freely about events or people. Even with the acquisition of English, Italian Americans expressed their words in songs.

Talese poses provocative questions such as: “Where are the Italian-American writers?” His statement served to awaken the Italian-American writing community.

In his essay, “Origins of a Nonfiction Writer,” Talese writes of his “eavesdropping youth” spent in his mother’s dress shop, which was “a kind of talk show that flowed around the engaging manner of my mother.” This notion of curiosity is seen in the minor characters — the ordinary people — he championed throughout his career, as in “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” where the entire interview is an amalgam of minor characters, from the lady who held Sinatra’s wigs to the press agent and the preening blondes on barstools. Talese didn’t want to write about Frank Sinatra for Esquire because, as he told us, everything had already been written about Sinatra. When he finally agreed to do the essay, he said, “It was almost better that Sinatra couldn’t talk to me.”

In 2017, this writer was pleased to share a float with the impeccable Mr. Talese at New York’s Columbus Day Parade. The grand marshal was of Barnes & Noble CEO Len Riggio, and to lead the celebration, he invited a hundred Italian-American writers.

Gay and Nan Talese, an editor and a New York publishing industry veteran, have been married since 1959. His indefatigable reporting skills and clever use of language have made him a paragon of the New Journalism.