Frank McCourt, School Teacher and Pulitzer Winner, Dies

Frank McCourt, former New York highschool teacher and Pulitzer Prize winning author of the memoir Angela’s Ashes, which recounted his childhood in Ireland, died this weekend at the age of 78. From the New York Times obituary:

Mr. McCourt began teaching in 1958, when he was 28, at Ralph R. McKee Vocational High School in Staten Island and from 1972 to 1987 taught at Stuyvesant High School, a highly selective school then on East 15th Street in Manhattan. His students learned from him that literature was nothing more — and nothing less — than the telling of stories.
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“In the teachers’ cafeteria veterans warned me, Son, tell ’em nothing about yourself. …You’re the teacher. You have a right to privacy. The little buggers are diabolical. They are not, repeat not, your natural friends. … You can never get back the bits and pieces of your life that stick in their little heads. Your life, man. It’s all you have.”

He went on: “The advice was wasted. … My life saved my life.”

NPR has a number of audio excerpts from his books here.

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