McCourt Passes Away

a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_PddQ8xLinAc/SmPSqOK8ETI/AAAAAAAAHAc/KDG1oC01b1M/s1600-h/mccourt+from+the+baltimore+sun.jpg"img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 145px; height: 201px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_PddQ8xLinAc/SmPSqOK8ETI/AAAAAAAAHAc/KDG1oC01b1M/s400/mccourt+from+the+baltimore+sun.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360359604301336882" border="0" //aThe world lost one extraordinarily gifted and generous soul yesterday.br /br /R.I.P Frank McCourt who a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/07/remembering-frank-mccourt-author-of-angelas-ashes.htmlRemembering%20Frank%20McCourt,%20author%20of%20%27Angela%27s%20Ashes%27"passed away, aged 78/a in a hospice. He had contracted meningitis, following skin cancer treatment.br /br /McCourt's first book, the brilliant autobiography a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela%E2%80%99s_Ashes"span style="font-style: italic;"Angela's Ashes/span/a, detailed a miserable childhood growing up impoverished in Ireland and was published when the author was 67. It won him a Pulitzer Prize.br /br /McCourt taught English for much of his life and Eric Konigsberg at span style="font-style: italic;"The New York Times/span a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/books/20frank.html"pays tribute to McCourt the storytelling teacher/a. (My review of his book span style="font-style: italic;"Teacher Man/span is a href="http://thebookaholic.blogspot.com/2005/12/teacher-man.html"here./a )br /br /In span style="font-style: italic;"The Baltimore Times/span Paul Golub, now the editorial director of Times Books at New York publisher Henry Holt amp; Co., a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/hc-frank-mccourt-author-angela-ashes-tis-dead-dies,0,6088220.story"recalls his experience of taking McCourt's creative writing course/a at Stuyvesant in 1979 :br /span style="font-style: italic;"/spanblockquotespan style="font-style: italic;"The class was always hilarious and one exercise I remember was McCourt asking us to write about what we had for dinner last night ... He wasn't interested in the typical vague writing but understood that everything was details, details, details -- who bought the chicken, who cooked it, how it was cooked. He would make us read Mimi Sheraton's restaurant reviews in The New York Times so that we could conceive of the idea of writing descriptively about food. It was in Mr. McCourt's class that I first heard that mashed potatoes could be 'satiny.' Before I took Mr. McCourt's class, my writing was very labored. But after he was done with me my writing was fluid and less self-conscious. He liberated me to become myself./span/blockquoteWill append more tributes as they appear in the papers.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7912730-4526943362806600508?l=thebookaholic.blogspot.com'//div

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