Legacy MattersFrank McCourt, author of the memoir everyone loved, Anglela's Ashes, died of cancer in New York, age 78..
Lyrical, sad and laugh out loud funny, Angela's Ashes won the Pultizer Prize and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 117 weeks.
Matt Schudel writes in the Washington Post
Mr. McCourt, the oldest of seven children, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where his parents had arrived from Ireland in the 1920s. But their luck soon ran out, and they moved back across the Atlantic when he was 4. They settled in his mother's native city of Limerick in a house with no electricity or running water. It was next to a public lavatory, where the entire neighborhood dumped buckets of excrement that often flooded the McCourts' floor.
"The [school]master says it's a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland," Mr. McCourt wrote in a passage laced with pathos and humor, "and I wonder if there's anyone in the world who would like us to live."
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He had chronic conjunctivitis that left him without lashes on his lower eyelids. At 10, he almost died of typhoid fever and spent more than three months recovering in a hospital. It was the first time he had slept in a bed with sheets or had a full stomach. He also had his first encounter with Shakespeare, writing that it was "like having jewels in my mouth when I spoke the words."
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Mr. McCourt's brother Malachy, who teamed with his brother in a two-man revue of stories and songs in the 1980s, said: "In reality, our life was worse than Frank wrote. Insane outbreaks of laughter saved us."
In a 1966 review, With Love and Squalor, Washington Post book editor Nina King wrote,
"WHEN I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. 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."
It takes a tough reviewer to resist quoting this paragraph from the opening page of Angela's Ashes, and it takes a splendid writer to fulfill the promise of those lines. I am not that reviewer, but Frank McCourt is definitely that writer. This memoir is an instant classic of the genre -- all the more remarkable for being the 66-year-old McCourt's first book.
New York Times
Critics, enchanted by Mr. McCourt’s language and gripped by his story, delivered the kind of reviews that writers can only dream of. But the book was ultimately a word-of-mouth success.-
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It was “Angela’s Ashes” that loomed over all things McCourt, however, and constituted a transformative experience for its author.
Speaking to students at Bay Shore High School on Long Island in 1997, he said, “I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.”