Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn (1930). His parents were Irish immigrants, and when Frank was four years old, the family moved back to Ireland. McCourt had a difficult childhood, living in extreme poverty with an alcoholic father who was often absent. Three of his six brothers and sisters died from malnutrition and disease. He wrote: "People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying school masters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all — we were wet."
When Frank McCourt was 19, he managed to make it back to America, where he worked at a hotel and at a hat factory. Then he was drafted into the Army and fought in Germany. Afterward, the Army let him go to college on the GI bill, even though he didn't have a high school education. And from there, he became a teacher. He taught English in the New York public schools for 30 years, and he frequently told his students stories about his childhood.
And then, after he retired, he started to write his story. But he struggled with the voice. He had written about 20 pages, and one night he made a note for himself about something he wanted to write about the next day, and he jotted it down in a simple present tense. And it felt right, so the next day he started writing in the voice of a child, and that became his memoir of his childhood in Ireland, Angela's Ashes (1996). It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it stayed on the New York Times best seller list for two years. He followed it up with two more memoirs, 'Tis (1999) and Teacher Man (2005).
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