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, Talese helped to define contemporary literary journalism and is considered, along with Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson, one of the pioneers of New Journalism. Talese's most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra. Early life Born in Ocean City, New Jersey, the son of Italian immigrant parents, Talese graduated from Ocean City High School in 1949. Writer origins High school Talese's entry into writing was entirely happenstance, and the unintended consequence of the then high school sophomore's attempt to gain more playing time for 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 Talese recalls in his 1996 memoir Origins of a Nonfiction Writer: After only seven sports articles, Talese was given his own column for the weekly Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger. By the time Talese left for college during September 1949, he had written some 311 stories and columns for the Sentinel-Ledger. Talese credits his mother as the role model he followed in developing the interviewing techniques that would serve him well later in life, interviewing such varied subjects as mafia members and middle-class Americans on their sexual habits. He relates in A Writer's Life: College Talese graduated from the University of Alabama in 1953. His selection of a major was, as he described it, a moot choice. "I chose journalism as my college major because that is what I knew," he recalls, "but I really became a student of history." At university, he became a brother of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. It was here that Talese would begin to employ literary devices more well known for fiction, such as establishing the "scene" with minute details, and beginning articles in medias res (Latin for "into the midst of things"). During his junior year, Talese became the sports editor for the campus newspaper, Crimson-White, and started a column he dubbed "Sports Gay-zing", for which he wrote on November 7, 1951: This was before Lillian Ross did the same in Picture (1952) or Truman Capote used the technique in The Muses Are Heard (1956). More importantly, Talese included among