Frank McCourt, the Brooklyn-born Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose memoir of a miserable childhood skyrocketed him to international fame, died July 19 in Manhattan. He was 78 years old. The cause of death was skin cancer, according to published reports.
McCourt was born to Irish immigrant parents on Classon Avenue, on the border of Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant. His time in Brooklyn was brief, though, as his parents, Malachy and Angela, returned the family to Limerick for better prospects. In Ireland, McCourt’s father abandoned the family, and his mother struggled to feed her seven children, three of whom died early in life.
His experiences eventually led McCourt to write “Angela’s Ashes,” which sold four million copies in hardback and won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award.The book was made into a Hollywood film in 1999. “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood,” was how McCourt began “Angela’s Ashes,” which he called an “epic of woe.”
“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.”
Before the book was published, McCourt taught in the city’s school system for nearly 30 years, getting his start at a vocational school in Staten Island and later teaching creative writing at Stuyvesant High School.
His success came late in life, and he was unprepared for it, he told the Associated Press in 2005. “After teaching, I was getting all this attention. They actually looked at me — people I had known for years — and they were friendly and they looked me in a different way. And I was thinking, ‘All those years I was a teacher, why didn’t you look at me like that theni”’
He said he liked most of all to hear from former students. “At least they knew that when I talked about writing I wasn’t just talking through my hat,” he said.
– Gary Buiso