Dusty Quotations

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Who is Frank McCourt?

Francis McCourt (August 19, 1930 – July 19, 2009) was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Angela’s Ashes, a tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood.

Early life and education

Frank McCourt was born in New York City’s Brooklyn borough, on August 19, 1930, the eldest child of Irish Catholic immigrants Malachy Gerald McCourt, Sr. (October 11, 1899  – January 11, 1985), of Toome, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, who was aligned with the IRA during the Irish War of Independence, and Angela Sheehan (January 1, 1908 – December 27, 1981) from Limerick. Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy Jr. (1931–2024); twins Oliver and Eugene, born in 1932; and a younger sister, Margaret, who died just 21 days after birth, on March 5, 1934.

In fall of 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression, the family moved back to Ireland. Frank was 4 years old. His brother Malachy was 3 and the twins were 2 years old. Unable to find steady work in Belfast or Dublin and beset by Malachy Senior’s alcoholism, the McCourt family returned to their mother’s native Limerick, where they sank even deeper into poverty. They lived in a rain-soaked slum, the parents and children sharing one bed together, McCourt’s father drinking away what little money they had. His father, being from the north and bearing a northern accent, found this trait to be an added stressor to finding a job. The twins Oliver and Eugene died in early childhood in consequence of the squalor of their circumstances, and two more boys were born: Michael John, who later lived in San Francisco (where he was called the “Dean of Bartenders”) until his death in September 2015; and Alphonsus, who published a memoir of his own and died in 2016. Frank McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever when he was 11.

McCourt related that when he was 11, his father left Limerick to find work in the factories of wartime Coventry, England, rarely sending back money to support his family. McCourt recounts that eventually Malachy Senior abandoned Frank’s mother altogether, leaving her to raise her four surviving children, on the edge of starvation, without any source of income. Frank felt obliged as a child to steal bread, milk, and lemonade in an effort to provide for his mother and three younger brothers, until relatives stepped in to aid the family.

Frank’s formal education in Limerick ended at age 13, when the Irish Christian Brothers rejected him as a student in their secondary school. Frank then worked for the post office delivering telegrams from age 14 to 16; then he worked for Eason’s delivering magazines and newspapers, and he gave most of what he earned to his mother. Less formally and in secret, he wrote debt-collection letters for a local Limerick woman who paid for clothing and other items and allowed debtors to make payments with high interest rates. Frank saved his money and once he had saved enough to pay the fare to New York and have some money upon his arrival, he left Ireland on a freighter, at age 19.

Writing

McCourt won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography (1997) and one of the annual National Book Critics Circle Awards (1996) for his bestselling 1996 memoir Angela’s Ashes, which details his impoverished childhood from Brooklyn to Limerick. Three years later, a movie version of Angela’s Ashes opened to mixed reviews. Northern Irish actor Michael Legge played McCourt as a teenager. McCourt also authored ‘Tis (1999), which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of Angela’s Ashes and focusing on his life after he returned to New York. He subsequently wrote Teacher Man (2005), which details his teaching experiences.

Many Limerick natives, including Gerry Hannan and Richard Harris, accused McCourt of greatly exaggerating his family’s impoverished upbringing and hammering his mother. McCourt’s own mother denied the accuracy of his stories shortly before her death in 1981, shouting from the audience during a stage performance of his recollections that it was “all a pack of lies.” When McCourt travelled to Limerick to accept an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Limerick, those living in the city had mixed feelings about his book, or what they had heard about it if they had not read the book. McCourt was defended by Limerick socialist TD Jim Kemmy, who described Angela’s Ashes as ” the best book ever written about working class life in Limerick”. Many of his Stuyvesant High School students remembered quite clearly the mordant childhood anecdotes he continually told during sessions of his senior-level Creative Writing (E7W-E8W) elective. Reviewers in the US had high praise for his first memoir, including the literary critic for The New York Times.

McCourt wrote the book for the 1997 musical The Irish… and How They Got That Way, which featured an eclectic mix of Irish music from the traditional “Danny Boy” to U2‘s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”