The playwright Edward Albee is 82 today.
Barbara Feldon, Agent 99 of the “Get Smart” TV series, is 77.
James Taylor is 62 today. He’s seen a lot of fire and he’s seen a lot of rain by now.
Liza Minnelli is 64.
Jon Provost is 60. Who? Timmy on Lassie.
Courtney B. Vance is 50.
Dave Eggers is 40.
While he was in college at the University of Illinois, his mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Then, just after his mother went through severe stomach surgery, his father was diagnosed with cancer. Six months later, both of his parents were dead. Eggers was just 21 years old.
Of the experience of losing both of his parents so suddenly, Eggers later said, “On the one hand you are so completely bewildered that something so surreal and incomprehensible could happen. At the same time, suddenly the limitations or hesitations that you might have imposed on yourself fall away. There’s a weird, optimistic recklessness that could easily be construed as nihilism but is really the opposite. You see that there is a beginning and an end and that you have only a certain amount of time to act. And you want to get started.”
Eggers had to drop out of college to become the guardian of his 8-year-old younger brother. They moved to San Francisco, and Eggers used the insurance money from his parents’ deaths to start his own magazine with some high school friends. They called their publication Might Magazine, because the liked the fact that the word “might” conveyed both strength and hesitation. The magazine developed a cult following for the way it satirized the magazine format. Each issue included an erroneous table of contents, irrelevant footnotes, and fictional error retractions. In one issue, they wrote, “On page 111, in our ‘Religious News Round-up,’ we reported that Jesus Christ was a deranged, filthy protohippy. In fact, Jesus Christ was the son of God. We regret the error.” To raise money for the magazine, they sold the contents of their recycle bins to readers.
Excerpt above from The Writer’s Almanac (2008)
If you have never read Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
I’ve also been told that Eggers new book, Zeitoun
Jean-Louise Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on this date in 1922.
The story about how Kerouac composed On the Road is well-known: He cut up strips of tracing paper so that they’d fit in the typewriter, and taped them all together so he wouldn’t have to interrupt his flow of writing to adjust or add paper. He wrote the whole thing from start to finish in three weeks, with no paragraph breaks and minimal punctuation; and when he got up from his typewriter, he had in his hands a 119-foot-long scroll of a book that defined his generation.
The above is an excerpt. Click the link for a better look at how the book was created.
You know what Truman Capote said about On the Road?
“That’s not writing. It’s typing.”