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Author of Angela's Ashes dies at 78

Book was about his miserable childhood

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: July 20, 2009

NEW YORK - Frank McCourt, the beloved raconteur and former public school teacher who enjoyed post-retirement fame as an author, died yesterday of cancer. He was 78. He wrote Angela's Ashes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of woe about his impoverished Irish childhood.

Until his mid-60s, McCourt was known primarily around New York as a creative-writing teacher and as a local character -- singing songs and telling stories with his younger brother and otherwise joining the crowds at the White Horse Tavern and other hangouts for the literary crowd.

But there was always a book or two being formed in his mind and the world would learn his name, and story, in 1996, after a friend helped him get an agent and his then-unfinished manuscript was quickly signed by Scribner. With a first printing of just 25,000, Angela's Ashes was an instant favorite with critics and readers, and perhaps the ultimate case of the noncelebrity memoir, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I've proven him wrong," McCourt later explained. "And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the 30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools."

A native of New York, his parents were so poor that they returned to their native Ireland when he was little and settled in the slums of Limerick. Simply surviving his childhood was a tale; McCourt's father was an alcoholic who drank up the little money his family had. Three of McCourt's seven siblings died, and he nearly died from typhoid fever.

"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood," was McCourt's unforgettable opening.

"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 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."