“Journalism is very serious, and when done well,” said the 74-year-old writer Gay Talese, “it is beautiful.”

On Monday, April 17, Mr. Talese was in his bright East 61st Street living room, perched on a cracked brown leather couch and under an oil painting depicting a snowy Central Park. He had a strong Calabrian nose, a small, thin mouth, fine white hair and brown eyes that he shielded with his hand when he sought out a memory.

He struck such a pose when he recalled being a young reporter in the 1950’s, fresh out of the University of Alabama, and surrounded by the clacking keys and ringing bells of typewriters on the third-floor newsroom of The New York Times.

“Though I was doing daily journalism, I thought it would be a reference point for the future,” said Mr. Talese, remembering a day in which he was taking a characteristically long, long time to tinker with a story. That’s when a “third-string labor reporter” began badgering him.

“He was saying, ‘Come on, young man—you are not writing for posterity, you know,’” recalled Mr. Talese, dressed now in a sand-colored three-piece worsted suit that kept the crease well for its 25 years. “It was a revelation, and not a welcome one.”

A half-century later, and Mr. Talese is still missing deadlines because he labors over sentences for so very long. His ponderous nature and tendency to procrastinate are offered in ample portions in his sprawling new book, called A Writer’s Life. And what a life it is, brimming with failures, missteps, false starts and other assorted frustrations.

Yet Mr. Talese, speaking with unwavering earnestness, apologizes for none of that.

“You are going along for the trip,” he said. “You can’t have a destination. If you have figured that out, then what’s the point?”

Among other things, the book reveals that even Mr. Talese, who is canonized in journalism textbooks for his Esquire profiles, needs to compose the dreaded pitch letter. Granted, these pitches are addressed to acquaintances and editors such as Norman Pearlstine and Tina Brown. But his ideas are shot down. The words don’t come easy. (“Writing is not fun. It is not supposed to be fun.”) And after months of work, after cords of cardboard notepads have been covered in ink, many of his stories are ultimately killed.

Thanks to A Writer’s Life, more than a decade of Mr. Talese’s pursuits have now seen the light of day. Here is a disgraced Chinese soccer star, a haunted building and the restaurants that inexorably fail in it, a sociological study of The New York Times, civil rights in Selma, and Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt. (“There is no excuse for a white brute,” he said of Mr. Bobbitt. “And he gets his penis chopped off, and the woman becomes a heroine.”)

On the afternoon of April 17, he was happy that the book was done. Mr. Talese sipped sparkling water from a wine glass and talked about heading to the theater that night with the writer David Halberstam, an old Times colleague. He sat by the phone, anxious not to miss a call from his wife Nan, an editor and publisher at Doubleday.

The phone rang at around 4:30 p.m., but it was a computerized voice selling something.

“Do you get those calls?” Mr. Talese asked as he hung up the receiver. “I get them all day.”

Mr. Talese spends quite a bit of time at home, as is many a freelancer’s fate in these tightly budgeted days. He feeds the Australian terriers wet dog food from red cans labeled “Wellness” and watches ballgames in one of the house’s many empty bedrooms. He spends the morning writing in the windowless basement of the townhouse that he and his wife have bought piecemeal over the last 40 years. Down there, he surrounds himself with three desks. On one, four pieces of yellow legal-pad paper are dedicated to his newest project, a small accompaniment piece for a book of photographs documenting New York City.

“I have been working on that, only 500 words, for about six weeks,” said Mr. Talese of the piece, which was assigned by a veteran Times editor for the paper’s book-publishing department. “And now today, only today, I have the first page.”

That page was deeply scarred with blue corrections.

While many reporters might mock Mr. Talese’s snail-pace process, he takes pride in resisting the pressure to hand in premature work “on time” and bristles at nonfiction’s dependence on all things topical.

As he sat, elbows on knees, on the living-room couch, occasionally jogging his memory by slapping his right temple, as if catching a mosquito buzzing his ear, he spoke about the last time he succumbed to the pressures of a deadline. He had already left The Times by then and was writing for famed Esquire editor Harold Hayes. Some of his landmark pieces for that publication, including profiles on Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, were already behind him.

In the 1960’s, Hayes had given Mr. Talese a last-minute assignment to fill in for James Baldwin, who wrote a story different than the one Hayes had envisioned, and for which the editor had already set the plates for photographs. Mr. Talese wasn’t particularly proud of the piece, “Harlem at Night,” but he got it in under deadline.

During a chance meeting some weeks later, Hayes approached Mr. Talese and criticized the piece. He said that he’d seen better.

“And I said, ‘Fuck you, Hayes,’” Mr. Talese recalled. “I never met another deadline again. I said I’m never going to make another deadline, and I never did.”

That might be one of the reasons Mr. Talese has had such a tough time publishing of late. While his commitment to research is the stuff of legend—spending years at a time getting to know the characters of a story—it raises the question of when process stops and procrastination begins.

“Time is always a factor,” said Mr. Talese, specifying that he meant not only the time devoted to writing, “but before writing— to thinking.”

The fruits of that approach are his books: The Bridge, about the building of the Verrazano; The Kingdom and the Power, which tracked the family history of The Times; Honor Thy Father, a Mafia tale; Thy Neighbor’s Wife, in which he researched, firsthand, the changing sexual mores in America; and Unto the Sons, in which he delved into his own history, the story of a family of Italian immigrant tailors.

All of those books appear in different editions on the shelves of his fourth-floor study, where a dictionary was spread open to “reproductive imagination” and notes were stuck to a wall with sewing pins. While the new addition to the shelves is surely a relief to Mr. Talese (“When you haven’t been published for 13 years, it’s goddamned wonderful to be published”), he is nevertheless most esteemed by critics for his shorter, and crisper, magazine pieces. And he hasn’t written one of those in a long time.

Mr. Talese says he is currently on assignment to The New Yorker, though he won’t discuss what he is writing about. (“With [New Yorker editor David] Remnick, I don’t have to worry about meeting a deadline.”) Besides that, he says he is little tempted to get back into an increasingly competitive business in which reporters must contend not only with other newspapers, magazines and television, but with blogs and the immediacy of information offered by the Internet.

“I’m happy I don’t have to do what they are doing, because I couldn’t do it,” Mr. Talese said of the reporters now at The Times. “Maybe I’m too old—but maybe even when I was young, I was too old for that.

“I’m not online. I don’t have a line. I don’t have e-mail. Where I work downstairs, there isn’t even a telephone,” he said, explaining that he could see no joy in the “ephemeral jolt that some people get with getting there first.”

Mr. Talese said that he felt that the pressure to be first had in some ways corrupted the judgment of the people who currently run The Times. He could not for the life of him understand why the recent scandal involving Page Six was fronted above the fold, and he doubted whether previous editors Turner Catledge and Abe Rosenthal—both of whom Mr. Talese admired—would even have run the story.

Part of the problem, he thinks, is with the current publisher of The Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (“Sulzberger is very sure of himself and brings to the paper an attitude that is a little cute. Maybe a better word is too correct and too careful.”) His major beef with today’s reporters is that they come from the same milieu and mind-set as the people they’re supposed to be covering with a critical eye.

“There is not that hard difference between those on the outside and those on the inside,” said Mr. Talese, who fancies himself a perennial outsider. “And there is a lack of skepticism and also a lack of toughness.”

But Mr. Talese, the son of an Ocean City tailor who now carries a gold pen in his jacket’s breast pocket, also runs in privileged circles. He hosted a party for Norman Mailer last month in a sunlit and candy-striped extension built behind the living room. Painted and photographed portraits of him and his wife clutter the walls of the house. The stairs are lushly carpeted in red. His closet is stacked with more than 50 handmade suits and more than a dozen pairs of hand-cobbled shoes.

“I have one of the great wardrobes in American journalism,” he said.

His wife’s walk-in closet and separate bathroom were once the kitchen where they cooked on a hot plate and cleaned dishes in a tub back in the 1950’s. (“It’s still the same tub,” he said.) His marriage of 47 years “works because we both work,” Mr. Talese said; he also attributed some of its success to separate bathrooms. Perhaps one of the reasons Mr. Talese is such a dogged researcher is that researching is something done alone. He cherishes his space.

In fact, Mr. Talese was initially unsure that he wanted to get married at all. “I really thought that when you married, life would just be boring—completely. It would be the kind of life my mother and father had, to get right to it,” he said.

But while he was working on a story in Rome for The Times about Via Veneto, the main artery that piped life into the 1950’s Dolce Vita, Nan showed up practically demanding marriage.

“There are times that you don’t know how to say no determinately enough. She was persistent,” explained Mr. Talese, adding: “I stayed married, I didn’t have to stay married, you know. It doesn’t seem like 47 years, because we have had so many adventures.”

Invariably, those adventures for Mr. Talese have meant chasing stories, looking for the hard-luck or down-on-their-luck men and women who toil and struggle on the sidelines of history, whether they be in China, Selma, or between the branches of the Talese or Ochs-Sulzberger family tree.

“The point,” said Mr. Talese, “is that they are a story.”