Frank McCourt
Frank McCourt,retired teacher andsits during an interviewin his New York
apartment. Brother Malachy
McCourt says Frank McCourt died Sunday
afternoon July 19, 2009, at a Manhattan
hospice in New York City at age 78.
Mr. McCourt, 78, had spent the past 13 years buoyantly touring the globe on reading tours and writing two sequels to his 1996 best-seller, Angela's Ashes, which sold more than 5 million copies and was translated into more than 20 languages.
He was a survivor of poverty who became rich, the child of immigrants who made good. He was the retiree who stepped into a magical second life. He was the winning ticket for every ordinary person who has imagined that he or she could turn their lives into a book.
"What the memoir requires is a distinctive voice, and Frank was a master of his voice," said Mary Karr, a friend of McCourt and author of the best-selling memoir "The Liar's Club."
McCourt, the beloved former school teacher and author of "Angela's Ashes," died Sunday of cancer. He was 78, gravely ill with meningitis and recently was treated for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer and the cause of his death, said his publisher, Scribner.
"We had this big dinner party in Roxbury (Conn.) last month, and he was there," said author Gay Talese, a longtime friend. "I made him a vodka martini, and he didn't look at all like he was going to disappear from the Earth in a month. He was very jovial, as usual."
Until his mid-60s, McCourt was essentially a New York character — the kind who might turn up in a New York novel — teaching by day and at night singing songs and telling stories with his younger brother Malachy, and otherwise joining the crowds at the White Horse Tavern and other literary hangouts.
But there was always a book or two being formed in his mind, and the world would learn his name, and story, in 1996, after a friend helped him get an agent and his then-unfinished manuscript was quickly signed by Scribner.
