A Writer's Life Book

The inner workings of a writer's life, the interplay between experience and writing, are brilliantly recounted by a master of the art. Gay Talese now focuses on his own life the zeal for the truth, the narrative edge, the sometimes startling precision, that won accolades for his journalism and best-sellerdom and acclaim for his revelatory books about The New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power), the Mafia (Honor Thy Father), the sex industry (Thy Neighbor's Wife), and, focusing on his own family, the American immigrant experience (Unto the Sons). How has Talese found his subjects? What has stimulated, blocked, or inspired his writing? Here are his amateur beginnings on his college newspaper; his professional climb at The New York Times; his desire to write on a larger canvas, which led him to magazine writing at Esquire and then to books. We see his involvement with issues of race from his student days in the Deep South to a recent interracial wedding in Selma, Alabama, where ...

Trevor Butterworth

At the age of 74, and 14 years after his last major book, A Writer's Life may seem a coda, an attempt to recover the time bound up in all the manila folders sitting in his office before they are buried in some university archive. But these wonderful stories, borne on gossamer threads of inspiration and serendipity, are less a summing up than an introduction to a body of nonfiction that is a signal triumph of American literature. And as we are consumed by the effortlessness of blogging, the false plenitude of the Internet and the vaporous sublime of a democratized media, A Writer's Life is a timely reminder of literary craft, and what it really takes to produce writing worth reading.