Reviewed by Sarah Gianelli

Gay Talese began his literary career as a newspaperman for The New York Times in 1950. During the next decade, an increasing frustration with the rigid constraints of “just the facts ma’am” reporting led him to experiment with a style of nonfiction writing that went beyond a mere compilation of facts and quotes.

Talese began practicing this freer form of nonfiction writing in earnest when he became a writer for Esquire Magazine in 1960. In subsequent years, this reporting style, which employed techniques traditionally reserved for writing fiction while remaining true to the story at hand, would become known as the “New Journalism.” Although there was nothing truly new about this narrative form, Talese, along with unconventional reporters Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, has since been associated with its emergence.

Published in 1970, Fame and Obscurity: A Book About New York, a Bridge, and Celebrities on the Edge... is a collection of essays, articles and stories written in the previous decade that mark the shift from the standard reporting Talese practiced at The New York Times to a more expansive literary style characterized by finely detailed scenes, plenty of dialogue, and an obvious gift for getting his sources to reveal themselves.

The first essay that Talese wrote for Esquire was a laundry list of weird, little known tidbits about New York City and its inhabitants. He later expanded it into a book of essays called New York—A Serendipiter’s Journey. Reprinted in its entirety, this ode to the unnoticed oddities of the city forms the first part of Fame and Obscurity.

The following section, entitled “The Bridge,” is a short book about the daring lifestyles of the men who built New York’s Verrazano Bridge. The product of an immersion journalism assignment that lasted from 1961 to1964, “The Bridge” is indicative of Talese’s maturing style and an ability to tackle a story with complex, multiple narratives.

Fame and Obscurity closes with a collection of profiles (most of which first appeared in Esquire) that focus on individuals still inside stardom’s spotlight, and those who once were. Among them are the now famous pieces, “Frank Sinatra has a Cold,” which proved that an intriguing profile could be written without ever securing an actual interview; and an intimate foray in the mind of ex-heavy weight champ Floyd Patterson called “The Loser.” Also included are equally insightful articles about Joe DiMaggio, actor Peter O’Toole, and George Plimpton’s Paris Review posse.

Taken together, the works that comprise Fame and Obscurity are important not only because they demonstrate Talese’s developing style but because they highlight a time in his career that generated many of the story ideas he would later turn into best selling nonfiction books. The first of such books was “The Kingdom and the Power,” a behind the scenes account of The New York Times published in 1969, and, two years later, “Honor thy Father” a book about the mafia.

Talese best explains the correlation between the works showcased in Fame and Obscurity and those to come: “The obsession of a writer surface and reemerge in an unpredictable spiral;” he writes, looking back on the book many years later, “the techniques evolve, but the fantasies linger.”