December 2

"Frank McCourt is a wizard. He inhabits the mind of the child he was with such vital memory that boyhood pain and family suffering become as real as a stab in the heart." --William Kennedy

A year ago Frank McCourt burst onto the American literary scene with the unforgettable memoir Angela's Ashes, a book which won both the Pulitzer prize for biography and the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and which remained for months at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. For many years a high school writing teacher, Frank McCourt told an audience of Bay Shore High School students, "I learned the significance of my own insignificant life."

Dermot Quinn is Associate Professor of history at Seton Hall and author of Patronage and Piety: English Roman Catholics and Politics 1850-1900 (Stanford) and Understanding Northern Ireland (Baseline Books).