Frank McCourt Dies at 78

The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt, has died at the age of 78 after battling skin cancer and a bout of meningitis. McCourt had retired as a schoolteacher and was in his 60s when he wrote his first book, Angela's Ashes, which documented his family's misery in Limerick, Ireland in the 1930s. McCourt was born in Brooklyn, the first of seven children, before his poverty-stricken family returned to a house in Ireland with no running water or electricity. McCourt's poignant account of his childhood won a Pulitzer and sold more than 5 million copies.