Frank McCourt

Frank MCCourt was born August 19, 1930 in Brooklyn, NY. He died on July 19, 2009.

Regarding his childhood, McCourt wrote, “People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”

Frank McCourt's tragic childhood is well known, as it is the subject of his best-selling memoir, Angela's Ashes. McCourt's mother, the Angela in his book's title, was the mother of seven children of which Frank, born in Brooklyn during the Great Depression, was the eldest. In 1934, Frank's sister Margaret died and in the same year, when Frank's father was unable to find work, the McCourts returned to Limerick, Ireland, where the family lived in squalor. Two more of Frank's brothers died of malnutrition and Frank became very sick with typhoid fever and nearly died at the age of ten.

Frank's father, an alcoholic who rarely worked, left the family to pursue work in England when Frank was eleven, leaving the family to fend for themselves. At the age of thirteen, Frank quit school and attempted to support the family between odd jobs and petty larceny before being drafted into the U.S. Army at the start of the Korean War.

Upon returning from war Frank, with the help of the G.I. Bill, enrolled at New York University. When he graduated, he entered the New York City Public School System as a creative writing teacher and taught for 27 years, an experience chronicled in his 2005 memoir, Teacher Man.

After he retired from years of teaching creative writing, McCourt set out to write his own story. The result was the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir, Angela's Ashes (1997), in which McCourt recounts his life from boyhood through age 19, when he returns to the United States from Ireland.

His next memoir, 'Tis (1999), begins where Angela's Ashes leaves off, just before McCourt is drafted into the army and follows the author through his education at New York University and into his teaching career.

McCourt's final memoir, Teacher Man, is a memoir of the author's years as a teacher at Stuyvesant High School and his reflections upon the teaching life.

Frank Mccourt died of mestastic melanoma on July 19, 2009 at the age of 78. He was survived by his third wife, Ellen Frey, his three brothers, Malachy, Alphie, and Mike, his daughter Maggie, and three grandchildren.

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