Books Written by Frank McCourt

Four. Three memoirs — Angela’s Ashes (1996), ’Tis (1999) and Teacher Man (2005) — and one illustrated Christmas story, Angela and the Baby Jesus (2007), which came out in a children’s edition and an adult gift edition in the same year and is sold today as Angela’s Christmas. He wrote no novels. Outside the four there are two stage shows, A Couple of Blaguards and The Irish… and How They Got That Way, the text for Ireland Ever, a book of Jill Freedman’s photographs, and one chapter of Yeats Is Dead!, a relay novel by fifteen Irish writers.

Publication order, which is also chronological order: Angela’s Ashes (childhood in Limerick), then ’Tis (arriving in New York at nineteen and the years after), then Teacher Man (the classroom years, told again from a different angle). Angela and the Baby Jesus stands on its own and can be read at any point.

Yes, three: ’Tis (1999) and Teacher Man (2005), which continue the same story, and Angela and the Baby Jesus (2007), a picture book about his mother as a girl, now sold as Angela’s Christmas. None of them sold or was reviewed like the first.

Angela’s Ashes. It is the Pulitzer winner, and the two memoirs after it assume you have read it.

It has not been banned nationally anywhere, but it has been removed from individual American school districts, and the stated reason is almost always sexual content. In 2019 a Florida Tea Party group and the Florida Citizens Alliance challenged it in Marion County as obscene; the district pulled it from middle schools, a review committee recommended keeping it in high schools, and the school board agreed. In 2023 Marshalltown, Iowa, removed it from elementary schools to comply with a new state law, listing “sexual content” as the reason. In December 2023 it appeared on the list of more than 1,600 titles pulled from Escambia County, Florida, pending review. It is not on the American Library Association’s list of the hundred most challenged books of 2000 to 2009, although that is often claimed.

Yes. Angela’s Ashes won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. It had already won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography/Autobiography and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography for 1996.

It is a memoir, written from memory about the 1930s and 1940s and published in 1996, and it was contested from the start — readers in Limerick said he had exaggerated the poverty and unfairly drawn the priests. McCourt did not claim documentary accuracy: the book is told in a child’s present tense, which is a literary choice, not a transcript. The family, the deaths and the lane were real.

Some did, loudly. The actor Richard Harris, a Limerick man, called the book full of historical inaccuracies, and the local filmmaker Gerry Hannan drew up a list of alleged errors and confronted McCourt about them on The Late Late Show in 1999. Others defended it: the Limerick TD Jim Kemmy called it the best book ever written about working-class life in the city. McCourt’s own answer was that he had written a memoir, not a history.

Malachy McCourt senior left Limerick for factory work in Coventry when Frank was eleven, sent money for a short while and then stopped. He went back to Northern Ireland and died in Belfast in 1985, aged eighty-five. In ’Tis McCourt describes him turning up in New York once, in 1963, promising he was a new man and arriving drunk off the ship; the visit lasted about three weeks. That last part comes from the book itself rather than from any independent source.

Angela Sheehan McCourt followed her sons to New York and died there in 1981; in 1985 they took her ashes back to Limerick. She did not accept her son’s account of the family, and once called it a pack of lies from the audience at a stage performance. Three of Frank’s brothers survived childhood: Malachy, the actor and memoirist, who died in 2024; Michael, a well-known San Francisco bartender, who died in 2015; and Alphie, who wrote his own memoir, A Long Stone’s Throw, and died in 2016.

First on Windmill Street, then in a lane off Barrack Hill — Roden Lane in the book — where the family lived in two rooms with a lavatory in the lane outside. He went to Leamy’s National School on Hartstonge Street, which later became the Frank McCourt Museum. The lane housing itself is gone.

Angela’s Ashes, ’Tis and Teacher Man. They are sometimes sold together as the Frank McCourt Memoirs, and they are one continuous life story in three parts.

Both, and the books are about exactly that. He was born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Irish parents, taken back to Limerick at four, and returned to New York alone at nineteen in 1949. He held American citizenship by birth and lived in New York for the rest of his life.

He taught English in New York public schools for close to thirty years, from McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island in 1958 to Stuyvesant High School, and retired in 1987. Teacher Man is the book about it. Before that he swept a hotel lobby, worked the docks and served two years in the army in Germany.

On 19 July 2009 in Manhattan, aged 78, of melanoma with meningeal complications. Angela and the Baby Jesus, from 2007, was his last book. His writing life lasted thirteen years, from the first book to the last.

No, and they are not related. This page is about the writer Frank McCourt (1930–2009), who taught school in New York and wrote Angela’s Ashes. Frank H. McCourt Jr. is an American businessman who owned the Dodgers from 2004 to 2012 and is a different person entirely.