Larry McMurtry is 72 today. Three years ago, The Writer’s Almanac had a good essay about McMurtry, in NewMexiKen’s opinion the best to write both fiction and nonfiction about the American west since his mentor Wallace Stegner. Two years ago NewMexiKen and Dad visited McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City, Texas. Here’s my report.
Tony Curtis is 83. Curtis received a leading actor Oscar nomination for The Defiant Ones.
Anderson Cooper is 41.
Allen Ginsberg was born on this date in 1926.
His father was a schoolteacher and occasional poet. His mother was a Russian immigrant and devoted Marxist. She was in and out of psychiatric institutions all through out his childhood and had to undergo electric shock treatments and a lobotomy. Ginsberg went to Columbia University on a small scholarship and there he began consorting with Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs. After college, he got a job in marketing research, wore a business suit everyday, and had on office on the 52nd floor of the Empire State Building. He says he started writing there, and that there he learned about careful manipulation of words.
He moved to San Francisco and became friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published Ginsburg’s [sic] first major work, Howl.
By his 30s, he was prematurely bald with a ring of hair on the fringe of his head and thick long black beard streaked with gray. He wore black rimmed classes and his Buddha belly was one of his most distinguishing features.
Ginsburg’s [sic] reading of Howl was reputed to have “turned the 1950s into the 1960s overnight.” It began:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
Ginsberg died in 1997.
Dr. Zaius was born on June 3rd in 1901. That’s Maurice Evans, famed stage actor, two-time Tony winner, who is perhaps most remembered for playing the Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith in Planet of the Apes.
Jefferson Davis was born on June 3rd in 1808.