Archive for NEEPS North East Eco-friendly People's Site
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kimmie
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Angela's Ashes Author Frank McCourt Dies | Quote: | Frank McCourt, the Irish-American author best known for his memoir Angela's Ashes, has died.
The 78-year-old lost his battle against a serious form of skin cancer, the New York Times quoted an executive at his publisher Scribner as saying.
A school teacher who came to writing late in life, McCourt won acclaim with his bleak but poignant picture of childhood in the slums of Limerick.
Angela's Ashes won McCourt the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, the National Book Critics Circle Award and other honours.
Millions of copies of the book were sold worldwide and it was adapted into a film starring Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle in 1999.
McCourt turned to his life in the United States for subsequent books, 'Tis and Teacher Man.
Born in New York, he was the eldest of seven children to Irish immigrant parents.
Angela's Ashes was a memoir of his impoverished upbringing that captured a feckless, drunken father with a gift for story-telling.
Already struggling when the Great Depression hit, the family moved back to Limerick, where they slipped deeper into poverty in the 1930s.
Three of McCourt's siblings died of diseases worsened by hunger and the squalor of their surroundings. He almost died of typhoid fever as a child.
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all," McCourt wrote.
"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."
His vivid prose captured the speech and quirks of his relatives, describing a harrowing childhood with compassion and humour.
After leaving school at 13, McCourt supported his mother and brothers and sisters with occasional jobs and petty crime.
At 19, he returned to the US, finding work at a New York hotel.
He subsequently trained as a school teacher, only later becoming a published writer.
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Julie
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They'll probably air the film as a tribute to him. It is well worth watching, it's a heartbreaking story.
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