Timelessness Gay Talese | Big Think

Timelessness

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Talese was drawn to journalism by the sense of wonderment about who he was in an alienated society.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gay Talese:

Gay Talese is an American journalist and a nonfiction writer. He wrote for The New York Times in the 1960s after working for its copy and obituary sections. In the 1950s, he was one of the first writers to add minute details, use literary flairs, and begin articles in medias res.

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."

He has written many non-fiction books, beginning with 1964’s The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. His 2006 autobiography A Writer’s Life focuses on his trials and failures as a writer, such as having a profile piece rejected by The New Yorker, which ironically reviewed the book positively and said it had a “distinctly moving” quality.

Gay Talese was named the winner of a George Polk Award for career achievement. The awards, presented by Long Island University, are considered among the top prizes in U.S. journalism. His latest book is High Notes: Selected Writings of Gay Talese.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Card: What is your writing style?

Gay Talese: Well, as I made reference to before, through my father’s craftsmanship, I write every sentence with a sense that it had better be the very best I’m capable of because I had an exalted sense of the lasting value of what I work. I mean my own work I believe is written in such a way that can be read 10 years after I write it or 20 years after I write it with the same sense of the presence I bring through prose to the subject I’m writing about. I never wanted to write ever, I mean even when I was young, I’m 76 now, when I was 26, 50 years ago, it was the same thing, I never wanted to write topically. I never wanted to write about something that was in the news today; therefore, that was why I was getting into print because I was writing about something current. I always stayed away or tried to stay away from anything that I thought wasn’t going to thanks to my careful chronicling or prose writing that wouldn’t be able to be read years hence with the same interest on the reader’s part as whatever the reader might bring to what I wrote immediately after it was published. So I didn’t want to be a journalist in that sense. In fact, I never was a very- I don’t think I was ever celebrated as a journalist; however, I’ve been celebrated-- reason I’m on this show. Whatever brings me to this show is not because I was a prize-winning journalist. I mean I wasn’t the kind of person that would win a Pulitzer ‘cause I wasn’t doing that kind of work. What I was trying to do when I was on a newspaper and continually throughout where I am today was trying to bring a sense of presence to what I’m writing to a reader who would otherwise not know about what I’m writing about. And therefore, I was trying to write in a way that was more identifiable with fiction writers or the great short story writers or the great novel writers or the great playwrights. I wanted to write stories. The only thing I wanted to bring to the kind of stories that I do and have always done is reality in the sense of the real name of the person and situations that are verifiably true. I believe that reality can be fantastic if you know people really well, if you can spend the time with people and get deeply into their character, into their sensibilities. You can write what seems to be fiction and it’s not. One of the reasons I take so long, I mean I’m hardly a prolific person when you consider I’ve been working, you know, for more than a half century and I have 11 books and 3 of them are rather short. But the reason it takes me so long is that I have to know the people very well. I have to establish a kind of relationship that goes beyond just professionalism, that becomes personal. Now, you know, I mean I’m not writing for the personal approval of the people I’m writing about. I’m not. I do maintain as a writer the prerogative of being fully in control of the manuscript. But on the other hand, I am so sensitive to the people I’m writing about and I know them so well and believe I can actually know how they think, not what they say as I’m speaking to you now, but I want to know and do think I do know how they think. And I bring that interior monologue into my prose. It isn’t direct quotation.

Read the full transcript at