Frank McCourt, author and former NYC public school teacher, died on Sunday, July 19 in Manhattan. He was 78. The New York Times reports that Mr. McCourt was born August 19, 1930 in Brooklyn to an impoverished family of Irish immigrants. At age four, he returned with them to Limerick, Ireland, to a torrid period of poverty and loss as chronicled in his memoir, Angela’s Ashes, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. “People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years,” a passage from the book reads, “but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”

Despite this upbringing, McCourt, at 19, was able to secure passage to New York. After several years of laboring jobs and a stint in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, Mr. McCourt gained admittance to New York University and received an English education degree in 1957. He taught high school students for the next thirty years, and earned a master’s degree in English from Brooklyn College along the way. In 1977, “A Couple of Blaguards,” the play he co-wrote with his brother Malachy, saw an Off Broadway stage for the first of several runs, and in 1987 after retiring from his teaching duties, he set to work on his childhood memoirs. “A modest book, modestly written,” Mr. McCourt said of the prize-winning result, often credited with revitalizing the genre. He would follow the memoir with two more: ’Tis, in 1999, and 2005’s Teacher Man. While both reached bestseller status, neither enjoyed the wild success of his first. Speaking to Long Island highschoolers in 1997 he said of his writing, “I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.”

Mr. McCourt was a Featured Presenter at two of AWP’s Annual Conferences—the 1999 Annual Conference & Bookfair at Albany, New York and the 2008 Annual Conference & Bookfair in New York City.