Frank McCourt Angela’s Ashes Author Died Of Cancer
Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author died on Sunday at the age of 78. McCourt taught in the NYC public schools for almost 3o years before publishing his “epic of woe”, Angela’s Ashes.
In it McCourt described a childhood of terrible deprivation. After his alcoholic father abandoned the family, his mother, Angela begged on the streets of Limerick to keep him and his three brothers meagerly fed, barely clothed and housed in a basement flat with no bathroom and a thriving population of vermin.
“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all,” the book’s second paragraph begins in a famous passage. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
Angela’s Ashes was an instant favorite with critics and readers, myself included. It was the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.
McCourt, who was 78, had been gravely ill with meningitis and recently was treated for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer and the cause of his death, said his publisher, Scribner. He died at a Manhattan hospice, his brother Malachy McCourt said.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.