Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Teacher Man

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Teacher Man

Frank McCourt taught in the New York City public schools for twenty-seven years, the last seventeen of which were spent at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. After retiring from teaching, Frank and his brother, Malachy, performed their two-man show, A Couple of Blaguards, a musical review about their Irish Youth. In September 1996, Scribner published Frank's childhood memoir, Angela's Ashes, which spent 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. After more than sixty-five printings, there are over 2.3 million copies in print in North America alone.

McCourt has won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award in Biography/Autobiography, The Boston Book Review's Non-Fiction prize, the ABBY Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Time Magazine and Newsweek chose Angela's Ashes as the best nonfiction book of 1996. The hardcover of Angela's Ashes spent 23 weeks at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The Alan Parker film of Angela's Ashes, starring Emily Watson, was released to wide acclaim in 1999; the same year that the second volume of McCourt's memoirs, 'Tis', was published.  Teacher Man was published in hardcover in 2005.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I've proved 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."  - Frank McCourt.

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This "beyond the book article" relates to Teacher Man. It originally ran in November 2005 and has been updated for the September 2006 paperback edition. Go to magazine.