Author Frank McCourt dies at 78

He was best known for the million-selling Angela's Ashes, a memoir about his childhood.

The memoir was published in 1996 and won a Pulitzer Prize.

His brother Malachy McCourt said Frank McCourt died on Sunday at a Manhattan hospice. Frank McCourt had been gravely ill with meningitis and recently was treated for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.

Until his mid-60s, Frank McCourt was known primarily around New York as a creative writing teacher and as a local character -- the kind who might turn up in a New York novel -- singing songs and telling stories with his younger brother and otherwise joining the crowds at the White Horse Tavern and other literary hangouts.

But there was always a book or two being formed in his mind and the world would learn his name, and story, in 1996, after a friend helped him get an agent and his then-unfinished manuscript was quickly signed by Scribner.

With a first printing of just 25,000, Angela's Ashes was an instant favourite with critics and readers and perhaps the ultimate case of the non-celebrity memoir, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.

Although some in Ireland complained that McCourt had revealed too much (and revealed a little too well), Angela's Ashes became a million seller, won the Pulitzer and was made into a movie of the same name, starring Emily Watson as the title character, McCourt's mother.

After Angela's Ashes, McCourt continued his story, to strong but diminished sales and reviews, in 'Tis, which told of his return to New York in the 1940s, and in Teacher Man. McCourt also wrote a children's story, Angela and the Baby Jesus, released in 2007.

McCourt was married twice and had a daughter, Maggie McCourt, from his first marriage.