Frank McCourt, 78; wrote 'Angela's Ashes'

Frank McCourt, 78, the retired New York teacher who launched his late-life literary career by tapping memories of his grim childhood in Ireland to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angela's Ashes, has died.

Mr. McCourt, who was recently treated for melanoma and then became ill with meningitis, died in New York City, his brother Malachy said.

"I'm a late bloomer," Mr. McCourt told the New York Times shortly after Angela's Ashes' publication in 1996.

The Brooklyn-born son of immigrants who returned to Ireland with the family during the Depression when he was 4, he taught in the city's public schools for three decades. At Stuyvesant High School, he advised his creative-writing students to write about their own lives. But he didn't write his own tale of growing up in a Limerick slum - which concluded when he emigrated to America at 19 - until years after he retired in 1987.

Described in Newsweek as "the publishing industry's Cinderella story of the decade," Angela's Ashes rose to No. 1 on best-seller lists, was translated into more than 20 languages and sold more than four million copies worldwide.

It also won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was later turned into a movie, propelling its author to fame and fortune. As Newsweek noted, "He's witty, articulate, and he's got the perfect Irish brogue: lyrical but penetrable."

He was the oldest of seven children born to young Irish immigrants. His heavy-drinking laborer father was unable to find work in the Depression, and the family moved back to Ireland. In "one of the juiciest slums this side of Bombay," Mr. McCourt wrote, their dank home was next to a rat-infested privy shared by an entire block.

His infant sister died while still in New York, and a year after returning to Ireland, twin brothers died of pneumonia. At 10, he was hospitalized for typhus. Whenever his father briefly landed a job, he spent his pay in pubs; his mother, the Angela of the title, sometimes was forced to beg. Young Frank, who stole food for the family, left school at 14 and took menial jobs.

Back in New York in 1949, Mr. McCourt took a hotel job, then was drafted during the Korean War and spent two years in Germany. Though lacking a high school diploma, he later said, he was "fairly well-read" and able to "talk" his way into New York University. He then took a job teaching English at a high school on Staten Island. A decade later, he received a master's degree from Brooklyn College.

As a teacher, Mr. McCourt would regale his students with horrifying yet often hilarious tales of his childhood. In the late '60s, he tried to write about his early years but considered his effort "appalling."

It wasn't until he watched his young granddaughter's vocabulary develop, that he realized how best to tell his story: through his eyes as a child.

He also wrote 'Tis: A Memoir, a sequel to Angela's Ashes; and Teacher Man, about his years as a schoolteacher.