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Francis "Frank" McCourt (August 19, 1930 – July 19, 2009) was an Irish-American teacher and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, best known as the author of Angela's Ashes, an award-winning, tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood. Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn, New York on 19 August 1930 to father Malachy McCourt (1901–1985) and Irish Catholic mother Angela Sheehan (1908–1981) Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy, born in 1931; twins Oliver and Eugene, born in 1932; and a younger sister, Margaret, who died just a... MORE

Francis "Frank" McCourt (August 19, 1930 – July 19, 2009) was an Irish-American teacher and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, best known as the author of Angela's Ashes, an award-winning, tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood. Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn, New York on 19 August 1930 to father Malachy McCourt (1901–1985) and Irish Catholic mother Angela Sheehan (1908–1981) Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy, born in 1931; twins Oliver and Eugene, born in 1932; and a younger sister, Margaret, who died just a few weeks after birth, in 1935. Following this first tragedy, his family moved back to Ireland, where the twin brothers died within a year of the family's arrival and where Frank's youngest brothers, Michael (b. 1936) and Alphie (b. 1940), were born. Brothers Malachy and Alphie also became autobiographical writers. Unable to find steady work because of the Depression and Malachy Senior's alcoholism, the McCourt family returned to their mother's native Limerick, Ireland in 1934, where they sank even deeper into poverty. McCourt's father, Malachy Senior, from Toome in County Antrim, was often without work, LESS