Frank McCourt

Francis McCourt (August 19, 1930 – July 19, 2009) was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Angela's Ashes, a tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood.[1]

For other people named Frank McCourt, see Frank McCourt (disambiguation).

Frank McCourt
McCourt at a New York City Housing Works bookstore in 2007
Born
Francis McCourt

(1930-08-19)August 19, 1930
Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
DiedJuly 19, 2009(2009-07-19) (aged 78)
Manhattan, New York, U.S.
Citizenship
Alma mater
OccupationMemoirist, writer, teacher
Notable work
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
'Tis
Teacher Man
Spouse(s)
  • Alberta Small
    ​
    ​
    (m. 1961; div. 1979)​
  • Cheryl Floyd
    ​
    ​
    (m. 1984; div. 1989)​
  • Ellen Frey
    ​
    (m. 1994)​
Parent(s)Malachy Gerald McCourt, Sr
Angela Sheehan
RelativesBrothers Malachy McCourt
Michael McCourt
Alphie McCourt
AwardsPulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1997
Signature

Early life and education

Frank McCourt was born in New York City's Brooklyn borough, on August 19, 1930, the eldest child of Irish Catholic immigrants Malachy Gerald McCourt, Sr. (March 31, 1901 – January 11, 1985), who claimed to have been in the IRA during the Irish War of Independence, and Angela Sheehan (January 1, 1908 – December 27, 1981) from Limerick.[2][3][4] Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy, born in 1931; twins Oliver and Eugene, born in 1932; and a younger sister, Margaret, who died just 21 days after birth, on March 5, 1934.[3] She was buried in Saint John Cemetery in Queens County, New York.[5]

In fall of 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression, the family moved back to Ireland. Frank was 4 years old. His brother Malachy was 3 and the twins were 2 years old. Unable to find steady work in Belfast or Dublin and beset by Malachy Senior's alcoholism, the McCourt family returned to their mother's native Limerick, where they sank even deeper into poverty.[3] They lived in a rain-soaked slum, the parents and children sharing one bed together, McCourt's father drinking away what little money they had. His father, being from the north and bearing a northern accent, found this trait to be an added stressor to finding a job. The twins Oliver and Eugene died in early childhood due to the squalor of their circumstances, and two more boys were born: Michael John, who later lived in San Francisco (where he was called the "Dean of Bartenders") until his death in September 2015;[6] and Alphonsus, who published a memoir of his own and died in 2016. Frank McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever when he was 11.

McCourt related that when he was 11, his father left Limerick to find work in the factories of wartime Coventry, England, rarely sending back money to support his family. Eventually, McCourt recounts that Malachy Senior abandoned Frank's mother altogether, leaving her to raise her four surviving children, on the edge of starvation, without any source of income.[3] Frank's school education ended at age 13,[3] when the Irish Christian Brothers rejected him as a student in their high school. Frank then held odd jobs and stole bread and milk in an effort to provide for his mother and three surviving brothers.

Career

Early career

In October 1949, at the age of 19, McCourt left Ireland. He had saved money from various jobs including as a telegram delivery boy[3] and stolen from one of his employers, a moneylender, after her death.[7] He took a boat from Cork to New York City. A priest he had met on the ship got him a room to stay in and his job at New York City's Biltmore Hotel. He earned about $26 a week and sent $10 of it to his mother in Limerick. Brothers Malachy and Michael followed him to New York and so, later, did their mother Angela with youngest son Alphie.[3] In 1951, McCourt was drafted during the Korean War and sent to Bavaria for two years initially training dogs, then as a clerk. Upon his discharge from the US Army, he returned to New York City, where he held a series of jobs on docks, in warehouses, and in banks.[3]

Teaching

Using his GI Bill education benefits, McCourt talked his way into New York University by claiming he was intelligent and read a great deal; they admitted him on one year's probation provided he maintained a B average. He graduated in 1957 from New York University with a bachelor's degree in English. He taught at six New York schools, including McKee Vocational and Technical High School, Ralph R. McKee CTE High School in Staten Island, New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, Stuyvesant High School, Seward Park High School, Washington Irving High School, and the High School of Fashion Industries, all in Manhattan. In 1967, he earned a master's degree at Brooklyn College, and in the late 1960s he spent 18 months at Trinity College Dublin, failing to earn his PhD before returning to New York City.

In a 1997 New York Times essay, McCourt wrote about his experiences teaching immigrant mothers at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn.[8]

Writing
External video
Presentation by McCourt on Angela's Ashes, September 19, 1996, C-SPAN
Booknotes interview with McCourt on Angela's Ashes, August 31, 1997, C-SPAN
Presentation by McCourt on Angela's Ashes, April 15, 1999, C-SPAN
Presentation by McCourt on Tis: A Memoir, December 7, 1999, C-SPAN
Presentation by McCourt on Teacher Man, December 8, 2005, C-SPAN

McCourt won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography (1997)[9] and one of the annual National Book Critics Circle Awards (1996)[10] for his bestselling 1996 memoir Angela's Ashes, which details his impoverished childhood from Brooklyn to Limerick. Three years later, a movie version of Angela's Ashes opened to mixed reviews.[11] Northern Irish actor Michael Legge played McCourt as a teenager.[12] McCourt also authored 'Tis (1999), which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of Angela's Ashes and focusing on his life after he returned to New York. He subsequently wrote Teacher Man (2005), which details his teaching experiences.

Many Limerick natives, including Gerry Hannan and Richard Harris.[3][13] accused McCourt of greatly exaggerating his family's impoverished upbringing and hammering his mother. McCourt's own mother denied the accuracy of his stories shortly before her death in 1981, shouting from the audience during a stage performance of his recollections that it was "all a pack of lies."[3] When McCourt travelled to Limerick to accept an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Limerick, those living in the city had mixed feelings about his book, or what they had heard about it if they had not read the book.[14] But at the very least, many of his Stuyvesant High School students remembered quite clearly the mordant childhood anecdotes he continually told during sessions of his senior-level Creative Writing (E7W-E8W) elective.[15]

McCourt wrote the book for the 1997 musical The Irish… and How They Got That Way, which featured an eclectic mix of Irish music from the traditional "Danny Boy" to U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."[16]

Recognition
McCourt at New York's Housing Works bookstore paying tribute to Irish poet Benedict Keily, 2007

McCourt was a member of the National Arts Club and was a recipient of the Award of Excellence from The International Center in New York. In 1998, McCourt was honored as the Irish American of the Year by Irish America magazine. In 1999, McCourt received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.[17] In 2002 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Western Ontario.

In October 2009, the New York City Department of Education, along with several partners from the community, founded the Frank McCourt High School of Writing, Journalism, and Literature, a screened-admissions public high school. The school is located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on West 84th Street. The Frank McCourt School is one of four small schools designated to fill the campus of the former Louis D. Brandeis High School. The Frank McCourt High School began classes September 2010. The first principal of the school is Danielle Salzberg, who previously served as acting principal at Khalil Gibran International Academy and as an assistant principal at Millennium High School in New York. Among the many community partners of the Frank McCourt school are the Columbia Journalism School and Symphony Space.

The Frank McCourt Museum was officially opened by Malachy McCourt in July 2011 at Leamy House, Hartstonge Street, Limerick.[18] This Tudor-style building was formerly known as the Leamy School, the former school of Frank and his brother Malachy. The museum showcases the 1930s classroom of Leamy School and contains a collection of memorabilia, including items such as school books of the period and old photos, all donated by former pupils of the school. As well as having a large selection of Angela's Ashes memorabilia, the museum has recreated the McCourt home as described in the book using period pieces and props from the Angela's Ashes motion picture. The downstairs of the museum houses the Dr. Frank McCourt Creative Writing centre.[19] The museum closed in October 2019.[20]

Personal life
McCourt in 2006
External video
Democracy Now! interview with Malachy McCourt about Frank McCourt's life and work, July 21, 2009

McCourt was married first in August 1961 to Alberta Small, with whom he had a daughter, Margaret. They divorced in 1979.[3] He married a second time in November 1984 to the psychotherapist Cheryl Floyd, and they divorced in 1989.[3] He married his third wife, Ellen Frey McCourt, in August 1994, and they lived in New York City and Roxbury, Connecticut.[3] His brother Malachy described the first two marriages as difficult, and praised his brother’s third wife Ellen as a woman who cherished his brother Frank, helping him to open up his creative side and write his books.[21]

He was a passionate fan of baseball and the New York Mets. In his free time, McCourt recreationally took up the sport of rowing. He once sank his WinTech recreational single scull on the Mohawk River in Upstate New York, and had to be rescued by a local rowing team.

Death

It was announced in May 2009 that McCourt had been treated for melanoma and that he was in remission, undergoing home chemotherapy.[22] On July 19, 2009, he died from the cancer, with meningeal complications,[1] at a hospice in Manhattan, a month before his 79th birthday.[4][23]

His mother, Angela Sheehan McCourt, and father, Malachy Gerald McCourt, predeceased him, in 1981 and 1985, respectively. He was survived by his brothers Malachy, Michael and Alphie. His last surviving brother Malachy wrote a third memoir, Death Need Not Be Fatal, at age 85 with Brian McDonald, talking of his own life, missing his brother Frank, and life after 30 years of alcoholism had ended.[24]

After his death in 2009, McCourt’s ashes were shared among his brothers, his wife and his daughter. On July 18, 2017, eight years after his death, his daughter Maggie spread her share of the ashes in Limerick, travelling there with two of her sons, Jack and Avery and his widow Ellen McCourt.[25] They scattered them in two places: at the ruins of Carrigogunnell Castle which overlooks the River Shannon at Clarina, a place where he rode a bicycle as a boy, dreaming of going to America; and at Mungret Abbey, where members of her Sheehan family are buried, which he mentioned to his daughter, but then said to her that it would be too much trouble to do that. Maggie did it anyway. The portion with his brothers are in an urn buried where the playwright Arthur Miller is buried, at Great Oak Cemetery, Litchfield, Connecticut.[25]

While his family were in Limerick, Angela’s Ashes - The Musical opened in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin on Thursday night, after a sell-out run in Limerick. The Frank McCourt Museum in Limerick continued to be popular; the museum’s curator Una Heaton accompanied the family as they traveled in Limerick in honor of Frank.[25]

Una Heaton, an artist by profession, painted a portrait of Frank McCourt when he was alive and gave it to his wife. She also coordinated a mosaic painting, with parts done by many artists and visitors to the museum, marking 20 years after he won the Pulitzer Prize, hanging it in the museum she founded in his name in Limerick.[26]

The Frank McCourt Museum on Hartstonge St in Limerick at the former Leamy’s National School building has since closed, in October 2019, after 10 years in operation. McCourt’s papers are at Glucksman Library in the University of Limerick.[20] Items in the museum were auctioned in 2020, and the founder and curator Una Heaton plans to write more about him and his times.[27]

Bibliography
  • Angela's Ashes. A memoir. Scribner. 1996
  • 'Tis. A memoir. Scribner. 1999
  • Dowell, Roddy; McCourt, Frank (2001). O'Connor, Joseph (ed.). Yeats is Dead!: A Novel by Fifteen Irish Writers. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-09-942234-1.
  • Teacher Man. A memoir. Scribner. 2005.
  • McCourt, Frank; Long, Loren (Illustrator) (2007). Angela and the Baby Jesus (Adult ed.). Scribner. ISBN 978-1416574705.
  • McCourt, Frank; Colon, Raul (Illustrator) (2007). Angela and the Baby Jesus (Children's ed.). Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0545127820.
  • McCourt, Frank; McCourt, Malachy (2011). A Couple of Blaguards. Samuel French. ISBN 978-0573699634.

References
  1. Grossman, Lev (July 19, 2009). "Frank McCourt, 'Angela's Ashes' Author, Dies". TIME. Retrieved April 4, 2013. For most of his life, until he was well into his 60s, Frank McCourt wasn't a writer; he was a teacher. But it is as a writer, the author of the wildly successful memoir Angela's Ashes, that he will be remembered. He died on July 19 in New York of meningitis. He was 78 years old.
  2. McGreevy, Ronan (October 24, 2017). "The final indignity of Frank McCourt's 'shiftless alcoholic father': Military pension file for Malachy McCourt, bad dad of Angela's Ashes, comes to light". The Irish Times. Retrieved January 14, 2021. His referees had told the department he did not have sufficient military service to qualify for a pension, so the department turned him down. The unnamed official did not elaborate. The files suggest that McCourt did not appeal the department’s findings, as many did at the time.
  3. "Frank McCourt obituary". The Telegraph. July 20, 2009. Retrieved January 14, 2021.
  4. Grimes, William (July 19, 2009). "Frank McCourt, Whose Irish Childhood Illuminated His Prose, Is Dead at 78". The New York Times. Retrieved January 8, 2011.
  5. "Margaret McCourt, died March 5, 1934". Retrieved January 14, 2021.
  6. Whiting, Sam; Colliver, Victoria (September 6, 2015). "Michael McCourt, S.F. bartender of renown, dies". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved August 20, 2020.
  7. Frank McCourt (February 2006). Interview with Frank McCourt. TVO. Event occurs at 9. Retrieved June 9, 2013.
  8. McCourt, Frank (May 11, 1997). "Mothers Who Get By". Opinion. The New York Times. Retrieved July 23, 2009.
  9. "The 1997 Pulitzer Prize Winners: Biography or Autobiography". The Pulitzer Prizes. 1997. Retrieved November 12, 2013. With text from the book jacket and some other information.
  10. "All Past National Book Critics Circle Award Winners and Finalists". Archived from the original on October 18, 2015. Retrieved November 12, 2013.
  11. "Angela's Ashes". Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster, Inc. Retrieved April 4, 2013.
  12. Angela's Ashes (1999) at IMDb
  13. McEntee, John (December 25, 2011). "Bitter feud between fellow Limerick men over destiny of 'Angela's Ashes'". Irish Independent. Retrieved December 27, 2011.
  14. Moran, Terence Patrick (December 29, 1997). "A Journey With McCourt Of Limerick". Observer. New York. Retrieved January 14, 2021. Being with Frank in a public place in New York is to know firsthand the power of freshly minted celebrity. In Limerick, however, opinion is rather more divided.
  15. Personal interview with Claire Roxanne Wilner Willett, November 1, 1998.
  16. Byrne, Terry (February 4, 2013). "Frank McCourt's 'The Irish… and How They Got That Way' is a celebration - Theater & art". The Boston Globe. Retrieved April 4, 2013. The proceedings bear out a determination to set the record straight about the tragedy of the Great Famine, and evince a reverence for John F. Kennedy, a pride in iconic Irish-Americans George M. Cohan and James Cagney, and a humorous, slightly bitter attitude toward British oppression
  17. "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
  18. "Frank McCourt Museum".
  19. "Frank McCourt museum opens in Limerick". 20 July 2011 – via www.rte.ie. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  20. Casey, Jess (September 28, 2019). "'It breaks my heart' to have to close Frank McCourt museum". Irish Examiner. Retrieved January 14, 2021.
  21. See interview with Malachy McCourt on Democracy Now!, July 21, 2009, cited above.
  22. "'Angela's Ashes' author Frank McCourt has cancer". USA Today. May 20, 2009. Retrieved May 22, 2009.
  23. Kelly, Antoinette (July 21, 2009). "A real Irish send-off for Frank McCourt". IrishCentral. Retrieved August 22, 2020.
  24. Heim, Joe (May 16, 2017). "Not dead yet! At 85, Malachy McCourt knows the end is near, but he still has more to say". Books. The Washington Post. Retrieved January 14, 2021.
  25. "Frank McCourt's last wish granted as ashes are scattered". The Irish Times. July 20, 2017. Retrieved January 14, 2021.
  26. Glavin, Katie (April 2017). "Una Heaton and the Frank McCourt Museum celebrates 20 Anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize". I Love Limerick. Retrieved January 14, 2021.
  27. Laffan, Rebecca (February 8, 2020). "Limerick's McCourt Museum founder says final farewell to Frank artifacts". Limerick Leader. Retrieved January 14, 2021.
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