Jake LaMotta, the boxer portrayed by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, is 89 today. He was middleweight champion of the world 1949-1951.
Canadian author Alice Munro is 79. Ms. Munro won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, “awarded once every two years to a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.”
Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.
Man Booker Internation Prize judging panel
Lolita, the actress Sue Lyon, is 64 today.
Arlo Guthrie is 63.
Bela Fleck is 52.
Adrian Grenier is 34 today.
Jessica Simpson is 30.
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.