Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland, into a phenomenally popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “Angela’s Ashes,” died in Manhattan on Sunday. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Conn.
The cause was metastatic melanoma, said Mr. McCourt’s brother, the writer Malachy McCourt.
Mr. McCourt, who taught in the city’s school system for nearly 30 years, had always told his writing students that they were their own best material. In his mid-60s, he decided to take his own advice, sitting down to commit his childhood memories to paper and producing what he described as “a modest book, modestly written.”
In it Mr. McCourt described a childhood of terrible deprivation. After his alcoholic father abandoned the family, his mother ? the Angela of the title ? begged on the streets of Limerick to keep him and his three brothers meagerly fed, poorly clothed and housed in a basement flat with no bathroom and a thriving population of vermin. The book’s clear-eyed look at childhood misery, its incongruously lilting, buoyant prose and its heartfelt urgency struck a remarkable chord with readers and critics.
“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all,” the book’s second paragraph begins in a famous passage. “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.
“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 alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”
“Angela’s Ashes,” published by Scribner in 1996, rose to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there for more than two years, selling four million copies in hardback. The next year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Two more installments of his life story followed: “ ’Tis” (1999), which described his struggle to gain a foothold in New York, and “Teacher Man” (2005), an account of his misadventures and small victories as a public-school teacher. Both, although best sellers, did not achieve anything like the runaway success of Mr. McCourt’s first book, which the British director Alan Parker brought to the screen in 1999.
Not to be outdone, Mr. McCourt’s younger brother Malachy, an actor, brought out two volumes of his own memoirs: “A Monk Swimming” (1998), which also made the best-seller list, and “Singing My Him Song” (2000). Then, when it seemed that the McCourt tale had been well and truly told, Conor McCourt, Malachy’s son, gathered the four brothers, got them talking and filmed two television documentaries, “The McCourts of Limerick” and “The McCourts of New York.”
It was “Angela’s Ashes” that loomed over all things McCourt, however, and constituted a transformative experience for its author.
Speaking to students at Bay Shore High School on Long Island in 1997, he said, “I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.”
Francis McCourt was born Aug. 19, 1930, on Classon Avenue on the edge of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where his Irish immigrant parents had hoped to make a better life. It was not to be, largely because his father, Malachy, usually spent his scant laborer’s earnings at the local bar. Beaten, the family returned to Limerick when Frank was 4, and the pattern repeated itself.
Three of Mr. McCourt’s six siblings died in early childhood. The family’s circumstances were so dire, he later told a student audience, that he often dreamed of becoming a prison inmate so that he would be guaranteed three meals a day and a warm bed. At home, the staple meal was tea and bread, which his mother jokingly referred to as a balanced diet: a solid and a liquid.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 21, 2009 An obituary on Monday about the writer Frank McCourt included several errors. A memoir published by his brother Malachy McCourt is titled “Singing My Him Song,” not “Singing Him My Song.” The director of the film adaptation of Mr. McCourt’s memoir “Angela’s Ashes” was Alan Parker, not Robert Parker. And Mr. McCourt’s birth date was Aug. 19, 1930, not Aug. 30, 1930, as it was given in some editions because of an editing error.
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