Jake LaMotta, the boxer portrayed by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, is 88 today.
Alice Munro is 78.
She has written 11 books of short stories, and a new collection, Too Much Happiness, which comes out later this year. In May, Alice Munro won the Man Booker International Prize.
She said: “It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, ‘Read,’ but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, ‘Don’t read, don’t think, just write,’ and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you’re going to be a writer you’ll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think ‘There must be something else people do,’ you won’t quite be able to quit.”
Lolita, the actress Sue Lyon, is 63 today.
Arlo Guthrie is 62.
Bela Fleck is 51.
Adrian Grenier is 33 today.
Jessica Simpson is 29.
Arthur Ashe, the first black man to win a major tennis championship, was born on this date in 1943. Ashe won Wimbledon, the U.S. and Australian Opens. He died from pneumonia, a complication of AIDS, in 1993. He contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion during surgery (not altogether uncommon before the disease was understood).
Marcel Proust was born on July 10th in 1871. His fame is based on the novel The Remembrance of Things Past — À la recherche du temps perdu is actually better translated In Search of Lost Time and that has become in recent years the more common title. Jane Smiley belongs to that tiny group that has read the entire 3,000-page work — she wrote about her experience for Salon in 2005. A brief excerpt from her story:
[I]t is time for you to begin, because reading all of Proust is not hard.
First, you buy all seven volumes in a uniform edition — mine came in a six-book set — and you arrange them in a row next to your bed, the bathtub or your favorite chair, wherever you are most comfortable reading. For a few days, let’s say no longer than a week, you glance at them from time to time and pick them up and look at the covers. You can even flip the pages — but don’t read anything. You are familiarizing yourself with this new acquaintance. You are coming to recognize his appeal. You are letting him impose upon you, because for the next 70 days or so, you are going to organize your free time around him.