Pulitzer-Prize winning author Frank McCourt died on Sunday.
From the NY Times News Service:
NEW YORK – 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 in Manhattan yesterday. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Conn. The cause was metastatic melanoma, said Mr. McCourt’s brother, the writer and actor Malachy McCourt.
Mr. McCourt, who 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, Mr. McCourt described a childhood of terrible deprivation. After his 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.
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