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Pulitzer-winning author of Angela's Ashes is dead at 78
Ed Harris20.07.09
Frank McCourt, the Irish-American author best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes, has died at the age of 78.
He was suffering from meningitis and had recently been treated for melanoma. He died yesterday at a New York hospice.
Angela's Ashes, a memoir of McCourt's childhood in Ireland that chronicled his impoverished upbringing, sold millions of copies worldwide. The book won a 1997 Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award and other honours, and was made into a 1999 film starring Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle.
Before the book's 1996 publication, McCourt was a New York high school teacher for 30 years, and turned to that life for his subsequent books, 'Tis and Teacher Man.
McCourt was born in New York, the eldest of seven children born to Irish immigrant parents.
Angela's Ashes was an unsparing memoir that captured a feckless, drunkard father with a gift for story-telling, and the family's impoverished life in New York and Limerick.
"It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while," McCourt wrote.
