Today is the birthday of memoirist Frank McCourt, born in Brooklyn in 1930. He was the oldest of seven children born to an Irish immigrant couple, and they moved back to Limerick when he was four years old after the death of his baby sister. His childhood was marked by poverty, the deaths of half of his siblings, and his father’s alcoholism.
He went back to America when he was 19, and served in the Korean War. After the war, he went to college at New York University on the GI Bill, even though he never graduated from high school, and he became a high school English teacher in New York City.
He wanted to write a memoir for years, but he was too angry and bitter. Finally, while listening to his young granddaughter playing, he realized he had to write it from the viewpoint of his child self. And that became his best-selling book, Angela’s Ashes, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997.
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