Any proper biography of Gay Talese would also be a history of modern American journalism, if only incidentally. Talese, now 93, started in the field as a teenager, publishing hundreds of columns in his hometown paper, New Jersey’s Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger, before he turned 18. In the decades since, he has been a New York Times reporter, a magazine writer, and the author of several best-selling books, including Honor Thy Father (1971) and Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1981), based on his immersive reporting. He has been a close observer of journalism’s power struggles and cultural shifts, most notably in The Kingdom and the Power (1969), his book about the New York Times. He has also been famous himself for much of this time, which has given him the dubious honor of having journalism practiced upon him in turn.
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