A Life In Books: Gay Talese

Author of one of the most influential profiles in modern journalism--"Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"-- Gay Talese is now working on a portrait of his own marriage. PERI wanted to know which writers were influential to him . Gay Talese has a list:

MY FIVE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS

1) "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Religious hypocrisy in America--it's all there, and amazingly relevant.

2) "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Dagny Taggert is a woman of gigantic ego, purpose and arrogance. She's Hillary Clinton.

3) "Mixed Company" by Irwin Shaw. He's a romantic--I am, too--and I wanted to write nonfiction in the spirit of his short stories.

4) "Underworld" by Don DeLillo. He writes astonishing scenes. Seagulls hovering over a garbage dump--you can see the seagulls, smell the garbage. The pieces of shoes: poetry. T. S. Eliot couldn't do it better.