The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten Page B

question that his major would be journalism.
    For Talese, journalism was an escape hatch—not only from the pinched circumstances of his childhood but also from his own personality, which tended toward reticence. “I didn’t know who I was in those days,” he said. “I had no sense of myself.” Now a northeastern Italian Catholic in a southern school, Talese yet again found himself buffeted by ethnic and cultural differences, but writing would be his redemption. If he paid close attention to others, he could gain their confidence, and strengthen his own self-worth in the process. It was all about being empathetic, listening closely. It was a trait he had learned from his mother, who was always careful never to interrupt any of her customers. “I learned [from my mother] … to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt even when people were having great difficulty in explaining themselves, for during such halting and imprecise moments … people are very revealing,” Talese wrote in 1996. “What they hesitate to talk about can tell much about them. Their pauses, their evasions, their sudden shifts in subject matter are likely indicators of what embarrasses them, or irritates them, or what they regard as too private or imprudent to be disclosed to another person at that particular time.”
    At the University of Alabama, Talese thrived. His literary tastes matured, and he began reading a steady diet of American fiction, particularly John O’Hara, Carson McCullers, and Irwin Shaw. Talese admired McCullers for her empathetic depictions of the southern underclass and the ways in which she treated marginal characters with dignity and a minimum of sentiment. From O’Hara and Shaw, Talese learned how tosketch the peculiar mores of urban dwellers in clear, elegant prose. He began to structure his stories around individual scenes or set pieces, and he used more dialogue to bring his stories to life. In his junior year Talese was named the sports editor of the University of Alabama’s
Crimson White
student paper, and created a sports column for himself called “Gay-zing,” a forum that allowed him to further develop his literary storytelling skills.
    By the time Talese graduated from the University of Alabama in 1953, his literary reporting style was fully formed. A college friend of his who was a cousin of the
New York Times
managing editor Turner Catledge suggested that Talese get in touch with Catledge and ask about potential work. Talese headed straight for the
Times’s
headquarters on West Forty-third Street and asked the receptionist if he could see Turner Catledge. Amazingly, Catledge invited Talese up to his office, and two weeks later Talese was offered a copy boy job.
    Talese’s first unsigned stories for the
Times
were unsolicited pieces that he wrote during his off hours and then forwarded to
Times
editors. A few of these, such as a story about the man who operated the ticker-tape billboard that curled around the Times Square building, made it into the paper, and soon Talese was getting assignments to write harmless general-interest stories. His earliest signed pieces—a story on the pedal-operated rolling chairs on the Atlantic City boardwalk, Sunday magazine features about Broadway star Carol Channing, the new bowling chic, and baseball-themed pop songs—were written in the prevalent
Times
style of the era, foursquare and structurally sturdy.
    Talese’s
Times
career was interrupted by a short stint in the Army Tank Corps in Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he wrote a column called “Fort Knox Confidential” for the base paper. It wasn’t until Talese returned to the
Times
in 1956 and was assigned to the sports desk that his lucid writing style blossomed. Talese was especially drawn to boxing, because it was a metaphor for just about everything—personal redemption, race, celebrity, and especially the trying art of losing. An athlete’s failures were more intriguing to Talese than his or her