Frank McCourt Books in Order

For the main memoir arc: Angela's Ashes → 'Tis → Teacher Man.
For the classroom years: Teacher Man.
For a short family story: Angela and the Baby Jesus / Angela's Christmas.
For the McCourt brothers on stage: A Couple of Blaguards.

Frank McCourt was born on August 19, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, to Irish immigrant parents, Malachy McCourt and Angela Sheehan McCourt. The family had gone to America looking for work, but the Depression gave them little room. When Frank was four, they crossed back to Ireland and settled among Angela’s relatives in Limerick.

Limerick did not rescue them.

The McCourts lived with cold, damp rooms, hunger, illness, and the daily uncertainty of whether Malachy, Frank’s father, would bring home wages or spend them in the pub. Malachy also gave his son stories, songs, and a love of language, which made him both damaging and hard to dismiss. Frank nearly died of typhoid fever at ten, and the long hospital stay gave him rare time with books. By thirteen, he was out of school and working where he could, delivering telegrams and doing odd jobs to help the family.

At nineteen, in 1949, McCourt returned to New York with little money and a head full of Limerick. He worked at the Biltmore Hotel and on the docks, then was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War and sent to Germany. The Army gave him a steadier footing, and the G.I. Bill helped him get into New York University even though he had never attended high school. He graduated in 1957 and became a teacher.

The classroom became his long second home.

McCourt taught English in New York City high schools for close to thirty years, including McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island and Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. His students were not always eager to discuss grammar or literature, so he learned to survive with stories, quick thinking, and assignments that let students use their own lives as material. That daily bargain between teacher and teenagers later became the heart of Teacher Man.

He had wanted to write for years, but he took the long road. A college assignment about a childhood bed showed him that the old Limerick material could hold a room, and he kept notebooks for decades. In the 1980s he and his brother Malachy turned family stories into the stage piece A Couple of Blaguards. After retiring from teaching in 1988, he finally stopped trying to turn the past into a novel and wrote it as memoir.

Angela’s Ashes was published in 1996, when McCourt was sixty-six. The book follows his childhood from Brooklyn to Limerick, with his mother Angela trying to hold the family together and his father drifting between tenderness, song, and drink. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the National Book Critics Circle Award, but the plain fact is enough: a retired teacher had found the voice he had been chasing.

He kept going. 'Tis follows the awkward young immigrant back in New York as he works, serves in the Army, studies, marries, and tries to become American without losing the marks of Ireland. Teacher Man turns to the blackboard years. Angela and the Baby Jesus / Angela's Christmas is smaller and gentler, a Christmas story drawn from a tale about his mother as a child.

McCourt died in New York City on July 19, 2009, at age seventy-eight. His books still draw readers who want memoir with hunger, embarrassment, family trouble, jokes at the wrong time, and a stubborn belief that a story can help you get through the day.