Writer of Pulitzer-winning Angelas Ashes,Frank McCourt,dies at 78
Frank McCourt,a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick,Ireland,into a phenomenally popular...
Frank McCourt,a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick,Ireland,into a phenomenally popular,Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir,Angelas Ashes,died in Manhattan on Sunday. He was 78. The cause was metastatic melanoma,said McCourts brother,Malachy McCourt.
McCourt,who taught in the citys school system for nearly 30 years,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 McCourt described a childhood of terrible deprivation. After his father abandoned the family,his mother,Angela,begged on the streets of Limerick to keep him and his three brothers meagerly fed,and housed in a basement flat with no bathroom and a thriving population of vermin.
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.
Angelas Ashes,published by Scribner in 1996,rose to the top of the bestseller 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.
Two more installments of his life story followed: Tis 1999,which described his struggle to gain a foothold in New York,and Teacher Man 2005,an account of his misadventures and small victories as a public-school teacher. Both,although bestsellers,did not achieve anything like the runaway success of McCourts first book,which the British director Robert Parker brought to the screen in 1999.
Francis McCourt was born on August 19,1930,on the edge of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn,where his Irish immigrant parents had hoped to make a better life. His father spent his labourers earnings at the local bar. The family returned to Limerick when Frank was four. The pattern repeated itself.
The familys circumstances were so dire that he often dreamed of becoming a prison inmate so that he would be guaranteed three meals a day and a warm bed. At home,the staple meal was tea and bread,which his mother jokingly referred to as a balanced diet a solid and a liquid.
When Frank was 11,his father went to work in a munitions factory in Britain and disappeared from the picture. After dropping out of school at 13,he delivered telegrams and earned extra income writing letters for a local landlady.
In 1949,McCourt left for New York. At a hotel in Midtown Manhattan,he was put in charge of the 60 caged canaries. Thirty-nine of them died. McCourt taped the bodies to their perches. A series of jobs followed.
McCourt won admission to New York University,where he earned a degree in English education in 1957. A year later he began teaching at McKee Vocational High School on Staten Island,an eye-opening experience recalled in Teacher Man.
In his first week,an unruly student threw a homemade sandwich on the floor,an act that astonished McCourt not so much for its brazenness as for the waste of good food. After appraising the sandwich,he picked it up and ate it.
In 1977,McCourt and his brother Malachy, cobbled together a series of autobiographical sketches into a play,A Couple of Blaguards. This excursion into the past motivated McCourt to undertake his childhood memoirs after he retired from teaching in 1987.
I think theres something about the Irish experience that we had to have a sense of humour or die, McCourt once said. Thats what kept us going: a sense of absurdity,rather than humour.
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