NEW YORK (AP) - July 19, 2009 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.
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 Malachy 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 favorite with critics and readers
and perhaps the ultimate case of the non-celebrity memoir, the
extraordinary life of an ordinary man.
"F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American
lives. I think I've proven him wrong," McCourt later explained.
"And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the
30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools."
The book has been published in 25 languages and 30 countries.
McCourt, a native of New York, was good company in the classroom
and at the bar, but 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. "People
everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years,
but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty, the
shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by
the fire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters; the English and
all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years."
The book was a long Irish wake, "an epic of woe," McCourt
called it, finding laughter and lyricism in life's very worst.
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.
The white-haired, sad-eyed, always quotable McCourt, his Irish
accent still thick despite decades in the U.S., became a regular at
parties, readings, conferences and other gatherings, so much the
eager late-life celebrity that he later compared himself to a
"dancing clown, available to everybody."
"I wasn't prepared for it," McCourt told The Associated Press
in 2005. "After teaching, I was getting all this attention. They
actually looked at me - people I had known for years - and they
were friendly and they looked me in a different way. And I was
thinking, `All those years I was a teacher, why didn't you look at
me like that then?"'
But the part of it he liked best, he said, was hearing "from
all those kids who were in my classes."
"At least they knew that when I talked about writing I wasn't
just talking through my hat," he said.
Much of his teaching was spent in the English department at the
elite Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, where he defied the
advice of his colleagues and shared his personal stories with the
class; he slapped a student with a magazine and took on another
known to have a black belt in karate.
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.
More than 10 million copies of his books have been sold in North
America alone, said Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.
"We have been privileged to publish his books, which have
touched, and will continue to touch, millions of readers in myriad
positive and meaningful ways," Simon & Schuster president Carolyn
Reidy said in a statement.
McCourt was married twice and had a daughter, Maggie McCourt,
from his first marriage.
His brother Malachy McCourt is an actor, commentator and singer
who wrote two memoirs and, in 2006, ran for New York governor as
the Green Party candidate. At least one of his former students,
Susan Gilman, became a writer.
McCourt will be cremated, his brother said. A memorial service
is planned for September.
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