In the summer of 1956, a twenty-four-year-old reporter named Gay Talese arrived at the New York Times and began learning how to write sentences that could not be ignored. He had grown up in Ocean City, New Jersey, the son of an Italian tailor who had taught him, by example, that craft was a form of dignity and that the care taken in making a thing was inseparable from its worth. Talese brought that conviction to journalism at a moment when the profession was being reshaped by writers who understood that the tools of fiction, scene, character, dialogue, and the selection of the telling detail could be applied to the reporting of actual events without sacrificing a word of truth. Among the writers who had made that argument most powerfully, whose entire career was a demonstration that clarity and precision were not the enemies of depth but its precondition, was Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had died in 1961, the year Talese's own career was finding its voice. The influence ran in one direction, but it ran deep.
Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, whose simple, clear, and distinctive style revolutionized literature so thoroughly that its effects are still being felt by writers who have never consciously studied him. His spare, muscular prose stripped fiction down to its essential elements and trusted the reader to feel what the words did not say, a technique he called the iceberg theory: the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Generations of writers absorbed this principle and passed it on, often without knowing its source, making Hemingway's influence one of the most pervasive and least visible in the history of American letters.
Few writers are better placed to reflect on that influence than Gay Talese, bestselling author of eleven books and one of the defining figures of American literary journalism. A reporter for the New York Times from 1956 to 1965, and since then a contributor to the Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and other national publications, Talese has spent his career demonstrating that Hemingway's lessons about precision, economy, and the weight of the unspoken apply as powerfully to nonfiction as to fiction. He comes to this conversation not as a biographer but as a fellow craftsman, someone who has spent a lifetime thinking about how sentences work and why some of them last.
In the conversation that follows, Talese shares his insight into Hemingway's life and work and the craft of writing itself, reflecting on what it means to follow, however distantly, in the footsteps of a writer who changed what prose was allowed to do.
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