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THE AUTHOR

Frank McCourt was a high-school English teacher and an award-winning memoirist. Born on August 19, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, his family returned to Limerick, Ireland, where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence. He memorialized the years between 1934 and 1949 in his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes and returned to the United States when he was 19. His second memoir, 'Tis, recalls his time as a U.S. soldier, his studies in New York, and his experiences as a high-school teacher.


In 1949 McCourt booked passage to New York. From the beginning McCourt sent money back to his mother so she could care for his younger siblings. In 1951 McCourt was drafted into the United States Army and served in Bavaria, Germany, where he learned to type. After his discharge in 1954 he returned to New York, where, following a series of office jobs, he entered New York University to study education. In 1958, true to his love for reading in general and literature in particular, he began his long high-school teaching career. Many of his students came from disadvantaged families, were not academically inclined, and showed little interest in learning, especially literature; consequently teaching was often a challenge.


By the late 1950s his brothers, one by one, had joined him in New York. During this time he met his first wife, Alberta Small, whom he married in 1961 and with whom he had a daughter, Margaret. In 1967 he received a master's degree in education from Brooklyn College. In 1970, after his divorce from Alberta, he returned to Dublin, where he studied for a doctorate at Trinity College but never finished.


For years McCourt tried to write a novel based on his experiences but decided to change course and write a memoir instead.
Angela's Ashes was published in 1996 and met with immediate critical and commercial success, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. The memoir has since been published in 27 countries and 17 languages, topping bestseller lists for months. In 1999 his novel became a major motion picture, and McCourt's memoir 'Tis, was published that year, picking up where Angela's Ashes left off. Teacher Man, describing his life as a teacher in New York high schools, followed in 2005.

Angela's Ashes started a series of successes that made an American dream come true: the destitute boy delivering papers in Limerick became a millionaire. In fact his major novel is credited with giving rise to a subgenre: the memoir of woe, flooding the in-boxes of New York agents and editors with other stories about coming of age in misery.


Frank McCourt died on July 19, 2009, in New York City. As the work of a master storyteller, McCourt's memoir continues to provide entertaining and deeply moving insights into the life of a child in a particular time and place.

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ANGELA’S ASHES

By stefanotani