Who

Talese is an author and one of the founding practitioners of the Hunter S. Thompson-style "New Journalism." His wife is editor Nan Talese.

Backstory

Raised in an Italian-American family in Ocean City, New Jersey—his father, Joseph, was a tailor—Talese broke into journalism early: While still in high school, he wrote a sports column for his local paper, a gig he was offered after writing up reports of school baseball games. After earning a journalism degree from the University of Alabama, he moved to New York in 1953. The day he arrived, Talese presented himself unannounced at the offices of the New York Times and asked to speak to the managing editor, the cousin of a college acquaintance. The gutsy move paid off: He was given a job as a copyboy and contributed a couple of articles to the paper before he was drafted into the army.

Talese returned to the Times in 1956 as a sports reporter, but he soon turned to less traditional fare, penning essays that pioneered the "New Journalism" style, employing literary techniques like vividly observational scene-setting and non-linear narration (exemplified in his sprawling 1966 Esquire feature "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," often considered the most influential magazine profile ever written). Talese's bestselling 1969 book about the Times, The Kingdom and the Power, solidified his status as a journalistic heavyweight, and he's been a New York literary fixture ever since.

Of note

Talese was quite prolific early in his career, but has published only three books in the past 35 years, and has yet to fulfill the three-book, $7 million contract with Knopf that he signed in 1991. His 2006 memoir, A Writer's Life, was largely an account of his struggles to write in recent years; most notably, he labored on a long piece about the Lorena Bobbitt saga for the New Yorker that was ultimately shelved. On a somewhat related note, he's said to be currently working on a book about his open marriage.

Drama

His book about the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbor's Wife, garnered a great deal of negative publicity when it was published in 1981. Critics particularly objected to Talese's hands-on research methods, which included running a Manhattan massage parlor, joining a California nudist colony, and actively participating in some of the sex acts he wrote about.

Personal

Gay has been married to wife Nan Talese—a highly-regarded editor with her own Doubleday imprint—for close to half a century. The couple has two daughters—Pamela, an artist, and Catherine, a photo editor at GQ—and two dogs. They live in an East 61st Street townhouse long known as a gathering spot for literary types, and have a second home in Gay's hometown of Ocean City, where he keeps his 1971 Stag Triumph.