Frank McCourt Memoirs
2 total works
Frank McCourt's glorious childhood memoir, Angela's Ashes, has been loved and celebrated by listeners everywhere for its spirit, its wit and its profound humanity. A tale of redemption, in which storytelling itself is the source of salvation, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Rarely has a book so swiftly found its place on the literary landscape. And now we have 'Tis, the story of Frank's American journey from impoverished immigrant to brilliant teacher and raconteur. Frank lands in New York at nineteen, in the company of a priest he meets on the boat. He gets a job at the Biltmore Hotel, where he immediately encounters the vivid hierarchies of this classless country, and then is drafted into the army and is sent to Germany to train dogs and type reports. It is Frank's incomparable voice -- his uncanny humor and his astonishing ear for dialogue -- that renders these experiences spellbinding. When Frank returns to America in 1953, he works on the docks, always resisting what everyone tells him, that men and women who have dreamed and toiled for years to get to America should stick to their own kind once they arrive. Somehow, Frank knows that he should be getting an education, and though he left school at fourteen, he talks his way into New York University. There, he falls in love with the quintessential Yankee, long-legged and blond, and tries to live his dream, But it is not until he starts to teach -- and to write -- that Frank finds his place in the world. The same vulnerable but invincible spirit that captured the hearts of listeners in Angela's Ashes comes of age. Frank McCourt's'Tis is one of the most eagerly-awaited audiobooks of our time, and it is a masterpiece.
A third memoir from the author of the huge international bestsellers Angela's Ashes and 'Tis. In Teacher Man, Frank McCourt details his illustrious, amusing, and sometimes rather bumpy long years as an English teacher in the public high schools of New York City. Frank McCourt arrived in New York as a young, impoverished and idealistic Irish boy - but who crucially had an American passport, having been born in Brooklyn. He didn't know what he wanted except to stop being hungry and to better himself. On the subway he watched students carrying books. He saw how they read and underlined and wrote things in the margin and he liked the look of this very much. He joined the New York Public Library and every night when he came back from his hotel work he would sit up reading the great novels. Building his confidence and his determination, he talked his way into NYU and gained a literature degree and so began a teaching career that was to last 30 years, working in New York's public high schools.
Frank estimates that he probably taught 12,000 children during this time and it is on this relationship between teacher and student that he reflects in Teacher Man, the third in his series of memoirs. The New York high school is a restless, noisy and unpredictable place and Frank believes that it was his attempts to control and cajole these thousands of children into learning and achieving something for themselves that turned him into a writer. At least once a day someone would put up their hand and shout 'Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt, tell us about Ireland, tell us about how poor you were...' Through sharing his own life with these kids he learnt the power of narrative storytelling, and out of the invaluable experience of holding 12,000 people's attention came Angela's Ashes. Frank McCourt was a legend in such schools as Stuyvesant high school - long before he became the figure he is now he would receive letters from former students telling him how much his teaching influenced and inspired them - and now in Teacher Man he will share his reminiscences of those 30 years as well as revealing how they led to his own success with Angela's Ashes and 'Tis.
Frank estimates that he probably taught 12,000 children during this time and it is on this relationship between teacher and student that he reflects in Teacher Man, the third in his series of memoirs. The New York high school is a restless, noisy and unpredictable place and Frank believes that it was his attempts to control and cajole these thousands of children into learning and achieving something for themselves that turned him into a writer. At least once a day someone would put up their hand and shout 'Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt, tell us about Ireland, tell us about how poor you were...' Through sharing his own life with these kids he learnt the power of narrative storytelling, and out of the invaluable experience of holding 12,000 people's attention came Angela's Ashes. Frank McCourt was a legend in such schools as Stuyvesant high school - long before he became the figure he is now he would receive letters from former students telling him how much his teaching influenced and inspired them - and now in Teacher Man he will share his reminiscences of those 30 years as well as revealing how they led to his own success with Angela's Ashes and 'Tis.