Teacher Man by Frank McCourt, ISBN 9780007173990

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Frank McCourt arrived in New York as a young, impoverished and idealistic Irish boy but one who crucially had an American passport, having been born in Brooklyn. He didn't know what he wanted except to stop being hungry and to better himself. On the subway he watched students carrying books. He saw how they read and underlined and wrote things in the margin and he liked the look of this very much. He joined the New York Public Library and every night when he came back from his hotel work he would sit up reading the great novels.

Building his confidence and his determination, he talked his way into NYU and gained a literature degree and so began a teaching career that was to last 30 years, working in New York's public high schools. Frank estimates that he probably taught 12,000 children during this time and it is on this relationship between teacher and student that he reflects in Teacher Man, the third in his series of memoirs.

The New York high school is a restless, noisy and unpredictable place and Frank believes that it was his attempts to control and cajole these thousands of children into learning and achieving something for themselves that turned him into a writer. At least once a day someone would put up their hand and shout 'Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt, tell us about Ireland, tell us about how poor you were ...' Through sharing his own life with these kids he learnt the power of narrative storytelling, and out of the invaluable experience of holding 12,000 people's attention came 'Angela's Ashes'.

RRP: $24.99

About the Author: Frank McCourt

Francis "Frank" McCourt (born 19 August 1930) is an Irish-American teacher and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, best known as the author of Angela's Ashes. Brother of author and actor Malachy McCourt.
He received the Pulitzer Prize (1997) and National Book Critics Circle Award (1996) for his memoir Angela's Ashes (1996), which details his childhood as a poor Irish Catholic in Limerick. He is also the author of 'Tis (1999), which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of the previous book and focusing on life as a new immigrant in America. Teacher Man (2005), detailed the challenges of being a young, uncertain teacher who must impart knowledge to his students. His works are often part of the syllabus in high schools. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Western Ontario.

Frank died in July 2009.

Selected Quotes By Frank:
"F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I've proven him wrong. And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the 30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools."

"I know the best deadly sin. And what do you think that is? Sloth, because that means laziness. And if you're not doing anything, you won't commit any of the other deadly sins."

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