The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times, The Institution That Influences the World

Gay Talese is an American author. As a writer for The New York Times and Esquire in the 1960s, he helped to define literary journalism. His most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra. Talese is a visiting writer at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of... Southern California each spring. Gay Talese was born into a Roman Catholic Italian-American family in Ocean City, New Jersey, located just south of Atlantic City. His southern Italian father, Joseph Talese, was a tailor who had migrated to the United States from Maida, a town in the province of Catanzaro in 1922 and his mother, the former Catherine DePaolo, was a buyer for a Brooklyn department store . At school as a child, he wore hand crafted suits from his father's shop which, he later reflected in his memoir Origins of a Nonfiction Writer , caused him to appear to be older than his classmates. He recounted his early years in his book Unto the Sons. Talese graduated from Ocean City High School in 1949. Talese is married to another writer, Nan Talese, a New York editor who runs the Nan A.
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