the presence of social slights. In high school, he found his way to the school newspaper, which gave him his life. Some lessons taught by the example of his father remained with him for all the years that followed. Gay Talese (named for his stonemason grandfather, Gaetano) would write the best-tailored prose of his generation of journalists.
The Ivy League was beyond him, in those days still rheumy with nasty strains of anti-Italian class prejudice. Talese ended up far from home, at the University of Alabama. There he majored in journalism, with growing ambitions to make his nonfiction as vital and deep as great works of the imagination. Like all of us, he was reading Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O’Hara, and (yes, I learned later) Irwin Shaw. They had many lessons to teach.
After graduating in 1953, Talese landed a job as a copy boy at The New York Times. He managed to have several pieces published in the Times, and then was called up by the U.S. Army. The Korean War had ended in a cease-fire, but while in the university, Talese was a member of the ROTC. Now they came knocking at his door. Off he went, to serve as a public information office at Fort Knox, Kentucky, longing to return to The New York Times. For any writer, boredom has its uses. He continued reading, writing, and imagining. When he returned to the Times in 1956, he was bursting with energy and journalistic visions. Literature had taught him that ordinary lives could be as dense, complicated, even heroic as those of people who ended up as statues in parks. He wanted to be their chronicler.
The path he followed at the Times led him into sports, with a focus on boxing. The prize ring offered primordial drama, one man against another, where the difference between triumph and defeat was often determined by will. Even in those days, when The New York Times was a rigidly edited, calcified newspaper, it was possible in sports to write more freely. That’s why they called it sportswriting. Talese began to excel at the craft, while embracing one huge lesson that he had already sensed: the best stories were usually in the losers’ dressing rooms.
At the same time, he was trying to write stories about ordinary people, many of whom were glibly dismissed as “losers.” At the Times, too many of those stories ended up on “the spike,” literally a spike soldered into a flat slab of metal and placed on an editor’s desk. It was the ultimate destination for rejected stories. Talese kept copies of his own rejected stories, reworked them, and started assembling his first book: New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey. Here were glimpses into the lives of people you might pass in the streets, or who were sitting beside you on the subway, or working at mean jobs far from the bright lights of Broadway. That first book (with photographs by Marvin Lichtner) was published in 1961, and the lyrical opening section was the first piece of writing by Talese to appear in Esquire. It would not be his last.
In the summer of that same year, I went to work for The New York Post, and my life had truly begun. While serving an apprenticeship covering fires and murders, I was happier than I had ever been. Among Hogarth’s laws of mastery, I didn’t have time for the first stage: imitation. But I was a compendium of all I had read and admired, along with the commandments of some tough old tabloid editors. In the fall, I received two enormous gifts: my first byline, and my first working press card.
And in the Gramercy Gym one afternoon, I met Gay Talese.
He was dressed, of course, in a perfectly cut suit and tie, highly polished shoes, a coat draped over his forearm. Jose Torres introduced us, and Talese smiled, and said something nice about a story I’d written the week before. I told him how much I admired his work. He shrugged and smiled in a modest way. The gym was noisy with shouts, and grunts, and a trainer yelling, “chin down, chin down.” Talese turned for a moment to the ring, where two welterweights moved fiercely against each other, their faces masked in thick headgear. His face went blank for a beat, as if he were recording what he was seeing. Then he turned back to me.
“I hope you’re having fun down there,” he said, meaning the Post.