Frank McCourt, Author of ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ Dies at 78

[babylonsister]

Frank McCourt, Author of ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ Dies at 78

By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: July 19, 2009



Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland, into a phenomenally popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “Angela’s Ashes,” died Sunday. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Conn.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, said Mr. McCourt’s brother, the writer Malachy McCourt.

Mr. McCourt, who had taught in the city’s school system for nearly 30 years, had always told his writing students that they were their own best material. In his mid-60s, he decided to take his own advice, sitting down to commit his childhood memories to paper and producing what he described as “a modest book, modestly written.”

In it he a childhood of terrible deprivation. After Mr. McCourt’s alcoholic father abandoned the family, his mother — the Angela of the title — begged on the streets of Limerick to keep him and his three brothers meagerly fed, poorly clothed and housed in a basement flat with no bathroom and a thriving population of vermin. The book’s clear-eyed look at childhood misery, its incongruously lilting, buoyant prose and its heartfelt urgency struck a remarkable chord with readers and critics.

“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all,” the book’s second paragraph begins in a famous passage. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

“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.”

“Angela’s Ashes,” published by Scribner in 1996, rose to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there for more than two years, selling four million copies in hardback. The next year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/books/20mccourt.html?hp

[Texasgal]

1. Oh how sad..

He was an awesome author! :cry:

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. He sure was.

[MichiganVote]

3. Loved his writing. Great teacher.

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. RIP.. Loved the book

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. Damn.

A great book, and the film was true to the story.
What a wonderful Irish face he has.

[stray cat]

6. That is sad - he brought joy with his books

[hfojvt]

7. funny how such a story can be lifting, somehow

My childhood was pretty happy. "Hardly worth my while"? I cannot say I regret it although it apparently leaves me deprived of material for a bestselling book.

edit: I meant to add that I never read his book either. Although I owned a bookstore until 1998, I am not sure I sold a copy either. I rarely dealt in hardbacks.

[Mrs. Overall]

8. Very sad.

[QC]

9. May he rest in peace and rise in glory! n/t

[rwheeler31]

10. We have lost a great teacher.

Rest in peace Mr. McCourt.

[Hekate]

11. What a wonderful legacy he left us all. Rest with the angels, Frank McCourt...

... and peace to his family.

Hekate

[Name removed]

12. Deleted sub-thread

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[Smarmie Doofus]

13. Also wrote 'Tis and Teacher Man.

They are all autobiographical and they are all excellent.

Condolences to Malachy and the rest of the family.

[MoonRiver]

14. RIP Frank McCourt. I loved Angela's Ashes.

It will always be a classic.