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'Tis: A Memoir

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Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

The appeal of McCourt as a reader of his own memoirs (Angela's Ashes flourished commercially on audio, in both abridged and unabridged formats) lies in his ability to express a sustained sense of wonder at the world around him. Also, his brogue is classic, an Irish species unto itself. Here he takes up where he left off in his last book, arriving in America. He is first guided by an Irish bartender who tells him to go to the New York Public Library and read Samuel Johnson. Thus assimilated, he becomes a supply clerk for the army, stationed in postwar Germany, then a warehouse laborer living in a rooming house, before earning a college degree at NYU and settling down as a teacher at a rowdy vocational high school in Staten Island. Along the way come romance and immigrant's-eye life observations aplenty, and a growing sense of knowingness develops even as McCourt's hopes are dashed against disillusions. Simultaneous release with the Scribner hardcover. Also available unabridged and on CD. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt was born in 1930's Brooklyn to Irish immigrant parents, Malachy and Angela. At the age of four, McCourt and his family moved back to Ireland and settled in Limerick. Shortly thereafter, McCourt's father abandoned the family to a life of poverty and struggle that shaped young Frank's life and future profession as a writer of his own memoirs, the critically acclaimed Angela's Ashes. McCourt attended school until the age of 14, at which point he was forced to drop out to help support the family. In 1949, he scraped together enough money to afford passage back to America. Once there, he worked odd jobs until his decision to go back to school and persuaded New York University to allow him acceptance among the ranks of the collegiate. McCourt began to teach in 1970 at Seward Park High School in Manhatten's Lower East Side. His students led lives similar to his own meager beginnings and in an effort to connect with them, he told them stories of his own impoverished childhood. Hoping to stimulate his income, McCourt occasionally wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, all the while continuing to write down his memoirs. In 1972, McCourt began teaching at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan where his students constantly delighted him and urged him to pursue his own writings, even as he urged them in their prospective talents. In 1994 McCourt retired from teaching to finally take the time to write the story of his life. After so many years of taking notes and writing down anecdotes, McCourt had compiled an impressive history. This history became the critically acclaimed Angela's Ashes, which hit bookstores in 1996 and went on to become a Pulitzer prize winning story in 1997. McCourt also wrote 'Tis, a book almost as well known as Angela' Ashes. He always told his students to write what they know and write it from the heart. In taking his own advice, he earned the highest honors possible for an author to achieve. 030

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Additional Info

Imprint

Scribner

Filesize

733.55 KB

Number of Pages

480

eBook ISBN

9780684845241

Awards

  • Audie Award
  • Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award
  • Friends of Libraries U. S. A. Readers' Choice Award
  • Listen Up Awards
  • New York City Book Awards
  • Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year

Excerpt from: 'Tis by Frank McCourt

Chapter One

When the MS Irish Oak sailed from Cork in October 1949, we expected to be in New York City in a week. Instead, after two days at sea, we were told we were going to Montreal in Canada. I told the first officer all I had was forty dollars and would Irish Shipping pay my train fare from Montreal to New York. He said, No, the company wasn't responsible. He said freighters are the whores of the high seas, they'll do anything for anyone. You could say a freighter is like Murphy's oul' dog, he'll go part of the road with any wanderer.

Two days later Irish Shipping changed its mind and gave us the happy news, Sail for New York City, but two days after that the captain was told, Sail for Albany.

The first officer told me Albany was a city far up the Hudson River, capital of New York State. He said Albany had all the charm of Limerick, ha ha ha, a great place to die but not a place where you'd want to get married or rear children. He was from Dublin and knew I was from Limerick and when he sneered at Limerick I didn't know what to do. I'd like to destroy him with a smart remark but then I'd look at myself in the mirror, pimply face, sore eyes, and bad teeth and know I could never stand up to anyone, especially a first officer with a uniform and a promising future as master of his own ship. Then I'd say to myself, Why should I care what anyone says about Limerick anyway All I had there was misery.

Then the peculiar thing would happen. I'd sit on a deck chair in the lovely October sun with the gorgeous blue Atlantic all around me and try to imagine what New York would be like. I'd try to see Fifth Avenue or Central Park or Greenwich Village where everyone looked like movie stars, powerful tans, gleaming white teeth. But Limerick would push me into the past. Instead of me sauntering up Fifth Avenue with the tan, the teeth, I'd be back in the lanes of Limerick, women standing at doors chatting away and pulling their shawls around their shoulders, children with faces dirty from bread and jam, playing and laughing and crying to their mothers. I'd see people at Mass on Sunday morning where a whisper would run through the church when someone with a hunger weakness would collapse in the pew and have to be carried outside by men from the back of the church who'd tell everyone, Stand back, stand back, for the lovea Jaysus, can't you see she's gasping for the air, and I wanted to be a man like that telling people stand back because that gave you the right to stay outside till the Mass was over and you could go off to the pub which is why you were standing in the back with all the other men in the first place. Men who didn't drink always knelt right up there by the altar to show how good they were and how they didn't care if the pubs stayed closed till Doomsday.