The Gay Talese Reader

And yet I have always believed, and have hoped to prove with my efforts, that attention might also be paid to "ordinary" people in nonfiction

Each of my books, in fact, draws inspiration in some way from the elements of my island and its inhabitants

common concerns of ordinary people

new form of nonfiction, one that brought the reader into close proximity to real people and places through the use of accurately reported dialogue, scene-setting, intimate personal details, including the use of interior monologue

it seems to me that many of the social and political questions that have been debated in America in the second half of the twentieth-century—the role of religion in the bedroom, racial equality, women's rights, the advisability of films and publications featuring sex and violence—all were discussed in my mother's boutique as I grew up during the war and postwar years of the 1940s

Journalism provided an escape and the first success for the undervalued but always curious Talese

has always turned away from the "big story" to report the unnoticed one

his father's life as an Italian-American in his 1992 Unto the Sons

Talese turned to sexual taboos for his third and most controversial book, the 1980 best-seller Thy Neighbors Wife

Nonetheless, Talese managed to enter and live for months with the Bonanno family, to ride unarmed with Bill Bonanno's bodyguards, and to write about them all