Newspapers: A Rebel's Look at the Kingdom

In 1965, Gay Talese quit his job as a general news reporter on the New York Times. His byline was appearing with increasing frequency, and "I liked working there," he says. "But I felt stifled by the dullness of the writing they demanded in those years." He switched to magazine writing and quickly made a name for himself as a practitioner of the so-called "new journalism" — highly interpretive reporting enlivened with plenty of descriptive personal detail. His gossipy profile of Times Managing Editor Clifton Daniel in Esquire became the talk of...