Frank McCourt, and How He Got That Way

Irish-American writer Frank McCourt, by all accounts an inspired New York teacher, lovely man and gifted writer, died July 19 at the age of 78. He had recently been diagnosed with melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer. He then contracted meningitis.

Angela's Ashes, his memoir about his early life in Brooklyn -- where he was born in 1930 -- and later Limerick, Ireland, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1997, as well the National Book Critics Circle Award. Alan Parker directed the movie, which was released in 2000, and starred Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle. I noticed that it is now available on On Demand.

His Irish immigrant parents left Brooklyn and reverse-migrated to Limerick in 1935 during the Great Depression, because their lives were so hard in the U.S. But things were worse in Ireland.

From Chapter 1: When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

With his younger brother Malachy McCourt, he coauthored a play, "A Couple of Blackguards." He also wrote another play, "The Irish...and How They Got That Way," as well as two more memoirs, Tis and Teacher Man, about his experiences in the U.S. Army, and as a teacher at Stuyvesant High School New York City , respectively.

My favorite Frank McCourt anecdote is his own comment about struggling to write Tis: "By the time I finish writing it," he said, "the publisher will have to change the title to Twas."

He was grand.