Frank McCourt Books In Order

Memoirs Books In Publication Order

  1. Angela’s Ashes (1996)
  2. ‘Tis (1999)
  3. Teacher Man (2005)

Picture Books In Publication Order

  1. Angela and the Baby Jesus / Angela’s Christmas (2002)

Plays In Publication Order

  1. A Couple of Blaguards (2011)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Yeats is Dead! (2001)
  2. From the Republic of Conscience (2010)

Memoirs Book Covers

Picture Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Frank McCourt Books Overview

Angela’s Ashes

Now a major motion picture from Paramount and Universal Pictures International. The 1 national bestseller. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the ABBY Award. ‘When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.’ So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness. Angela’s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.

‘Tis

Frank McCourt’s glorious childhood memoir, Angela’s Ashes, has been loved and celebrated by readers 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 age 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 blonde, 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 readers in Angela’s Ashes comes of age.

As Malcolm Jones said in his Newsweek review of Angela’s Ashes, ‘It is only the best storyteller who can so beguile his readers that he leaves them wanting more when he is done…
and McCourt proves himself one of the very best.’ Frank McCourt’s ‘Tis is one of the most eagerly awaited books of our time, and it is a masterpiece.

Teacher Man

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 one 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 shares his reminiscences of those 30 years and reveals how they led to his own success with ‘Angela’s Ashes’ and ‘Tis’.

Angela and the Baby Jesus / Angela’s Christmas

When my mother, Angela, was six years old, she felt sorry for the Baby Jesus in the Christmas crib at St. Joseph’s Church near School House Lane where she lived…
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Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize winning memoir Angela’s Ashes is a modern classic. Now he has written a captivating Christmas story about Angela as a child often cold and hungry herself compelled to rescue the Baby Jesus and take him home. This story is pure McCourt genuine, irreverent and moving.

It is elegantly illustrated by two time Golden Kite Award winner Loren Long and is the perfect Christmas story for all ages.

Yeats is Dead!

Roddy Doyle, Conor McPherson, Gene Kerrigan, Gina Moxley, Marian Keyes, Anthony Cronin, Owen O Neill, Hugo Hamilton, Joseph O Connor, Tom Humphries, Pauline McLynn, Charlie O Neill, Donal O Kelly, Gerard Stembridge, and Frank McCourtFifteen of Ireland’s brightest and most entertaining authors came together to benefit Amnesty International resulting in this raucous, raunchy, and diabolically entertaining mulligan stew of a novel. Yeats is Dead! is an elaborate mystery centered around the search for something more valuable and precious than anything else in Ireland an unpublished manuscript by James Joyce. A madcap chase ensues, spiced with the shenanigans of a spectacular array of characters: a sad*istic sergeant with the unlikely name of Andy Andrews; a urinal paddy salesman; and the unforgettable Mrs. Bloom, a woman who had tried everything but drew the line at honesty. Gratuitously violent and completely hilarious, Yeats is Dead! is an out of control tale of lust and literature that packs big laughs and an even bigger body count.

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