Frank McCourt: 1930-2009

Photo by David Shankbone

Frank McCourt, the former New York City schoolteacher whose memoir Angela's Ashes won him a Pulitzer Prize, passed away from cancer on Sunday in a Manhattan hospice. He was 78.

McCourt wrote Angela's Ashes, based on his family's hardships in Limerick, Ireland, when he was 66 years old. "At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids," he told the Hartford Courant in 2003. "I just wrote the book and was amazed and astounded that it became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. It still hasn't sunk in."

Part of the reason why McCourt waited so long before writing the book was out of respect for his mother, the Angela in its title. He told the Courant that she would have been "ashamed" of it. But to him, it was an important book to write. In an interview with the New York Times, he admitted, "All along, I wanted to do this book badly. I would have to do it, or I would have died howling."

A self-proclaimed "late bloomer," McCourt continued to write after Angela's Ashes became a #1 best-seller, brought in several awards and was adapted into a movie. He published 'Tis: A Memoir as its sequel in 1999, and in 2005, he published Teacher Man about his career in the New York City public school system.