It’s hard to overstate Gay Talese’s gold-standard reputation. A few years ago, David Halberstam called him “the most important nonfiction writer of his generation, the person whose work most influenced at least two generations of other reporters.”
The bedrock of that reputation consists of several exceptional magazine profiles from the 1960’s, in particular “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” published in Esquire in 1966. Helped along by one of the great modern magazine headlines, the piece became a canonical archetype of the so-called New Journalism — nonfiction conceived and written in the manner of fiction, with fully rendered scenes, extended conversations and plainly subjective depictions of mood. In 1969, Talese published “The Kingdom and the Power,” an institutional portrait of The New York Times, where he had been a reporter for nine years. That book became a best seller, certifying him as a literary pop star as well as a reporter’s reporter. Just two years after the Times book, he published another first-rate best seller, his story of a Mafia family called “Honor Thy Father.”
more from the NY Times Book Review here.