oh i read angela's ashes all right

and i STILL cry when i think of it. i've seen mr mccourt on television many times. i've never been lucky enough to see him in person. he absolutely wasn't bitter. he absolutely had a grand sense of humor. he absolutely seemed like a decent man. he got through hell and he shared what he could with us so we would know ANYTHING is possible.

we'll miss you frank
Frank McCourt, Author of ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ Dies at 78

By WILLIAM GRIMES
Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland, into a phenomenally popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “Angela’s Ashes,” died in Manhattan on Sunday. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Conn.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, said Mr. McCourt’s brother, the writer Malachy McCourt.

Mr. McCourt, who taught in the city’s school system for nearly 30 years, had always told his writing students that they were their own best material. In his mid-60s, he decided to take his own advice, sitting down to commit his childhood memories to paper and producing what he described as “a modest book, modestly written.”

In it Mr. McCourt described a childhood of terrible deprivation...........

pic:

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Frank McCourt in 2005 in a classroom at Stuyvesant High School in New York, where he taught creative writing.

Frank McCourt, Author Of Angela's Ashes, Dies At 78
Frank McCourt's 1996 novel "Angela's Ashes" sold more than 5 million copies
By RINKER BUCK The Hartford Courant
Frank McCourt, the Irish-American storyteller who parlayed the miseries of a Limerick upbringing into an extraordinary late-life literary blooming, died of cancer Sunday in New York City. McCourt, 78, had spent the past 13 years buoyantly touring the globe on reading tours and writing two sequels to his 1996 best-seller, "Angela's Ashes," which sold more than 5 million copies and was translated into more than 20 languages. He had been undergoing treatment for skin cancer in recent years and been released in early June from New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Center to recuperate at his Roxbury home. Two weeks ago he was diagnosed with meningitis, a frequent complication of patients whose immune systems are compromised by cancer treatment, and McCourt was moved to a New York hospice where over the past few days family and friends from around the world had gathered at his bedside. During the past decade McCourt had become a familiar, popular figure and a kind of permanent cultural resource around Connecticut............


pic: Frank McCourt author of 'Angela's Ashes' at his Roxbury home in 1999. (TOM BROWN / HARTFORD COURANT / August 9, 1999)