The image of New York in American literary non-fiction represented by Gay Talese’s A Serendipiter’s Journey

The paper is devoted to the image of New York City created by a representative of American post-war literary non-fiction, Gay Talese. What is especially brought into focus in the analyzed New York – A Serendipiter’s Journey is the approach the writer employs to present his personal picture of the city. Talese’s attitude consists in combining some key techniques of traditional reporting with a more individual and imaginative treatment relying on a wanderer’s/stroller’s point of view. From the perspective of a city traveller New York is unconventionally pictured through its untypical and usually unnoticed aspects such as e.g. forgotten places and odd occupations. It is emphasized that the writer’s image of the city actually results from a number of pictures accumulated in the course of his own and many other individual journeys. Finally, the paper accentuates the effectiveness of the literary journalistic technique of merging the non-fictional with the literary in order to convey the convincing and credible vision of reality.