McCourt, who was 78, had been 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. He diedat a Manhattan hospice, his brother Malachy McCourt said.
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Until his mid-60s, Frank McCourt was known primarily around New York as a creative writingteacher and as a local character - the kind who might turn up in a New York novel - singing songsand telling stories with his younger brother Malachy and otherwise joining the crowds at the WhiteHorse 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 wasquickly signed by Scribner. With a first printing of just 25,000, Angela's Ashes was an instant favorite with critics and readers and perhaps the ultimatecase of the non-celebrity memoir, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.
"F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I've proven himwrong," McCourt later explained. "And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools."
The book has been published in 25 languages and 30 countries.
McCourt, a native of New York, was good company in the classroom and at the bar, but few hadsuch a burden to unload. His parents were so poor that they returned to their native Ireland whenhe was little and settled in the slums of Limerick. Simply surviving his childhood was a tale;McCourt's father was an alcoholic who drank up the little money his family had. Three of McCourt'sseven siblings died, and he nearly perished from typhoid fever.
"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet isthe miserable Irish Catholic childhood," was McCourt's unforgettable opening. "People everywherebrag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irishversion: the poverty, the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by thefire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did tous for 800 long years."
The book was a long Irish wake, "an epic of woe," McCourt called it, finding laughter andlyricism in life's very worst. Although some in Ireland complained that McCourt had revealed toomuch (and revealed a little too well), Angela's Ashes became a million seller, won the Pulitzer and was made into a movie of thesame name, starring Emily Watson as the title character, McCourt's mother.
The white-haired, sad-eyed, always quotable McCourt, his Irish accent still thick despitedecades in the U.S., became a regular at parties, readings, conferences and other gatherings, somuch the eager late-life celebrity that he later compared himself to a "dancing clown, available toeverybody."
Much of his teaching was spent in the English department at the elite Stuyvesant High School inManhattan, where he defied the advice of his colleagues and shared his personal stories with theclass.
After Angela's Ashes, McCourt continued his story, to strong but diminished sales and reviews,in 'Tis, which told of his return to New York in the 1940s, and in Teacher Man. McCourt also wrote a children's story, "Angela and the Baby Jesus," releasedin 2007.
More than 10 million copies of his books have been sold in North America alone, said Scribner,an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.
McCourt was married twice and had a daughter, Maggie McCourt, from his first marriage.
His brother Malachy McCourt is an actor, commentator and singer who wrote two memoirs and, in2006, ran for New York governor as the Green Party candidate. At least one of his former students,Susan Gilman, became a writer.
McCourt will be cremated, his brother said. A memorial service is planned for September.
