Frank McCourt spent his infant
years in Brooklyn, his impoverished adolescence in Limerick,
Ireland, and most of his adult life as a teacher in the United States.
Though he never attended high school, McCourt spent more than thirty
years teaching writing at Stuyvesant, a prestigious public high
school in New York City. McCourt found his teaching career—which
he has referred to as a “learning career”—fulfilling, but he never
gave up his dream of becoming a writer. When he retired from teaching,
McCourt and his brother Malachy began to perform a two-man show
entitled A Couple of Blackguards, which featured
many of the songs the McCourts sang together back in Ireland.
McCourt decided to pursue his dream of becoming a writer
by telling his own story, in the present tense, more than four decades after
he left behind Ireland and the bleak, painful upbringing that fills
his memoir. Waiting decades before writing his autobiography gave
McCourt the perspective to talk about his troubled childhood at
a comfortable distance. He treats the subject of his own difficult life
with evenhandedness and objectivity, showing none of the spite, regret,
or rancor we might expect. Yet he never downplays the suffering
from acute hunger and deprivation he endured throughout his youth.
As he has said, Angela’s Ashes is “an epic of woe.”
Angela’s Ashes won the Pulitzer Prize,
the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and spent 117 weeks
on The New York Times hardcover best-seller list.
McCourt’s memoir and its sequel, ‘Tis, which tells
of his experiences as a young man in America, have become worldwide
best-sellers translated into many languages. A film version of Angela’s
Ashes appeared in 1999. Both books
have vaulted McCourt from an unknown first-time writer in his late
sixties to a world-renowned author deluged with thousands of fan
letters and requests for speaking engagements. McCourt’s success
is a testament to patience and perseverance. Angela’s Ashes serves
as a living record of the strong moral values and healthy sense
of humor McCourt maintained despite the suffering and woe he endured
as a child.
