Angela's Ashes author McCourt dies in NYC at 78

Frank McCourt, the beloved raconteur and former public school teacher who enjoyed post-retirement fame as the author of Angela's Ashes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of woe about his impoverished Irish childhood, died of cancer at age 78.

Frank McCourt, the beloved raconteur and former public school teacher who enjoyed post-retirement fame as the author of Angela's Ashes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of woe about his impoverished Irish childhood, died of cancer at age 78.

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McCourt had been gravely ill with meningitis and recently was treated for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. He died at a Manhattan hospice, his brother Malachy McCourt said on Sunday.

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 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.

"F Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives.