Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of Aug. 19th
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It is the 231st day of the year, leaving 134 days remaining in 2022.
He told his stories of growing up in Ireland with humor and humility, describing a childhood full of poverty and misery.
He came to being an author rather late in life, publishing his memoir, Angela's Ashes, in 1996 after a career of teaching high school. But it was a auspicious debut -- a bestseller that won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
It told the story of his young life: After being born in Brooklyn of Irish immigrant parents, the family returned to Ireland, eventually settling in his mother's hometown of Limerick, Ireland, in 1935. McCourt writes of his father's alcoholism, his family's destitute poverty, and his mother's struggles to feed five young children.
Soon after arrival in Ireland, his mother, Anglea, has a miscarriage. Within a year, two of the children die. McCourt tells of the family's despair, Angela's depression. and the inability of his father, Malachy, to hold onto a job. When he does land one, he winds up spending his pay in the pubs and is soon fired.
McCourt writes about being always hungry, living in slum houses with no heat or plumbing, and nearly dying of typhoid fever and spending months in the hospital when he was 10.
He eventually returned to New York, served in the Korean War, graduated from college and taught English in public schools for 27 years, most of them at Stuyvesant High School.
After the publication of Angela's Ashes -- which was adapted as a movie in 1999 -- he wrote two sequels, 'Tis and Teacher Man.
McCourt died in 2009.
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