Gay Talese - Biography

Biography

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 (he is sometimes erroneously identified as being from Brooklyn).

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 (1996), 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. Talese/Doubleday imprint. Gay and Nan Talese's marriage will be the subject of Talese's next book, the third in a series published by Knopf. The first two books, Unto the Sons and A Writer's Life, were published in 1992 and 2006, respectively.

Talese remains active in the Italian American community, including the National Italian American Foundation, which hosted a writer's series in his name. He has been an outspoken advocate for more Italian Americans to pursue careers in writing and editing.