Passages: ‘Angela’s Ashes’ author Frank McCourt

Published 10:18 pm Sunday, July 19, 2009

Frank McCourt, author of “Angela’s Ashes,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of woe about his impoverished Irish childhood, died Sunday in New York of cancer at age 78.

McCourt, who had been ill with meningitis, died of 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.

But 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. “Angela’s Ashes” was an instant favorite with critics and readers, and perhaps the ultimate case of the noncelebrity memoir, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.

Few had such a burden to unload. His parents were so poor that they returned to their native Ireland when he was little and settled in the slums of Limerick. Simply surviving his childhood was a tale; McCourt’s father was an alcoholic who drank up the little money his family had. Three of McCourt’s seven siblings died, and he nearly perished from typhoid fever.

“Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood,” was McCourt’s unforgettable opening.

After “Angela’s Ashes,” McCourt continued his story, to diminished sales and reviews, in “’Tis,” which told of his return to New York in the 1940s, and in “Teacher Man.”

Associated Press