Frank McCourt, Author of ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ Dies at 78 By WILLIAM GRIMES Published: July 19, 2009 Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland, into a phenomenally popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “Angela’s Ashes,” died Sunday. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Conn. The cause was metastatic melanoma, said Mr. McCourt’s brother, the writer Malachy McCourt. Mr. McCourt, who had taught in the city’s school system for nearly 30 years, had always told his writing students that they were their own best material. In his mid-60s, he decided to take...