‘Angela’s Ashes’ author McCourt dies in NYC at 78

A commenter says that the room in the photo is the old Stuyvesant High School building, so technically the photo caption is wrong because that's not Frank McCourt in Stuyvesant High School, it's Frank McCourt in the High School for Health Professions and Human Services in the building which was formerly Stuyvesant High School.

Anyway, I attest that it looks very much like the Stuyvesant High School I remember from the 1980s.

rish author Frank McCourt has died in New York City at age 78.

He was best known for the million-selling “Angela’s Ashes,” a memoir about his childhood. The memoir was published in 1996 and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Brother Malachy (MAL’-uh-kee) McCourt says Frank McCourt died Sunday afternoon at a Manhattan hospice.

Frank McCourt had been gravely ill with meningitis and recently was treated for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.

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 died at a Manhattan hospice, his brother Malachy McCourt said.

Until his mid-60s, Frank McCourt was known primarily around New York as a creative writing teacher and as a local character – the kind who might turn up in a New York novel – singing songs and telling stories with his younger brother Malachy and otherwise joining the crowds at the White Horse 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 was quickly 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 ultimate case of the non-celebrity memoir, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.