Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Frank McCourt Dies at 78

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times
July 20, 2009

Frank McCourt, the retired New York City schoolteacher who launched his late-in-life literary career by tapping memories of his grim, poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir "Angela's Ashes," died Sunday of cancer. He was 78.

McCourt, who was recently treated for melanoma and then became gravely ill with meningitis, died at a hospice in New York City, his brother Malachy told the Associated Press.

McCourt, the Brooklyn-born son of Irish immigrants who returned to Ireland with the family during the Depression when he was 4 years old, had spent three decades teaching English and creative writing in the New York public school system.

At elite Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, where he taught for many years, he had always advised his creative writing students to write about their own