Word: mccourts
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...McCourt, Frank • death...
Fame and fortune transformed McCourt's last years. He bought a second home in Connecticut, next door to Arthur Miller. There is now an Angela's Ashes walking tour in Limerick, and the university there awarded him a doctorate. He spent three months as a writer-in-residence in London, at the Savoy Hotel, and another term at the American Academy in Rome (during that time, he met Pope John Paul II and rather embarrassedly knelt and kissed his ring). But by all accounts McCourt himself was in no way transformed by his success. Though that doesn't mean...
...many years, McCourt tried and failed to write about his childhood. The family talent for storytelling kept him alive in the classroom, but he couldn't get the words down on paper. He kept company in bars with writers like Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, but his own voice stubbornly refused to emerge. The psychological weight of his past may have weighed him down. It also took a toll on his personal life; first one, then a second marriage ended in divorce. (He was married a third time, happily and permanently, in 1994.) He left the Catholic Church...
...result was his memoir Angela's Ashes, which appeared in 1996, when McCourt was 66. The book told the story of his early years in a voice purged of anger and bitterness and self-pity. In an extraordinary act of forgiveness, he wrote about his father with humor and even compassion. Angela's Ashes was published quietly, as the personal memoir of an Irish childhood. "My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalog number, that's all," McCourt said. But it became first a critical sensation, then a runaway best seller. In 1997 McCourt won the National Book...
...McCourt followed Angela's Ashes with two more volumes of memoir. 'Tis picked up where his first book left off, on his arrival in New York City; it sold spectacularly but received mixed reviews. Teacher Man - which was both a critical and commercial success - recounted his backbreaking years teaching English and creative writing, 18 of them spent at New York's famous magnet school Stuyvesant, where he was a legend as a compelling teacher. "George Bernard Shaw said those that can do, and those that can't teach," McCourt was fond of observing. "Just goes to show that Shaw didn...