Gaetano "Gay" Talese (; born February 7, 1932) is an American writer. As a journalist for The New York Times and Esquire magazine during the 1960s, he helped to define contemporary literary journalism and is considered, along with Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, one of the pioneers of New Journalism. Talese's most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.
Early life and education
thumb|Talese with [[Nan Talese at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival]]
<!--His father, Joseph Talese, was a tailor who had emigrated to the United States in 1922 from Maida, a town in the region of Calabria in southern Italy. His mother, the former Catherine DePaolo, was a buyer for a Brooklyn department store.
At school as a child, Talese wore hand-crafted suits from his father's shop which, he later speculated in his memoir, Origins of a Nonfiction Writer (1996), caused him to seem older than his classmates. Talese recounted his early years in his book Unto the Sons.
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Born in Ocean City, New Jersey, the son of Italian immigrant parents, Screenwriter and author Nicholas Pileggi is his first cousin.
Talese's entry into writing was entirely coincidental and an unintentional consequence of his attempt as a high school sophomore to gain more playing time on the baseball team. The assistant coach had the duty of telephoning in the chronicle of each game to the local newspaper and when he complained he was too busy to do it properly, the head coach gave Talese the duty. As he recalls in his 1996 memoiristic essay "Origins of a Nonfiction Writer":