When it was published in 1996, Angela's Ashes became an almost-immediate sensation, catapulting Frank McCourt, a longtime teacher at New York's Stuyvesant High School who had recently retired, to literary fame. The book, an intricately detailed, poetic, intimate memoir of McCourt's impoverished youth in Ireland, won multiple prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for biography/autobiography, and changed the literary landscape for memoirs. At 66, McCourt had never published a book before, but he soon became a household name.
Although McCourt was born in Brooklyn and Angela's Ashes depicts his earliest memories, most of the book takes place in Limerick, Ireland, McCourt's...
