Frank McCourt
Frank McCourt has spent his life in pursuit of dreams. As the first child of depression-era Irish immigrants who had returned to the poverty of Ireland, he spent his earliest years with a vision of leaving the squalor of Limerick and forever returning to the abundance of America. When he finally reached New York City at the age of nineteen he found a job sweeping up after the easily affluent university students he so desperately wanted to join as a peer. After an Irish-American bartender took away his pint and sent him directly to the public library to read Samuel Johnson's The Lives of the Poets, McCourt became an avid lover of literature. With the help of the GI Bill, McCourt was finally able to go to a university and soon became an English teacher, and by this time he was dreaming of becoming a writer and having his book jacket framed on the wall of his favorite literary cafe. Over thirty years later these dreams were realized when the publication of his gritty childhood memoir Angela's Ashes earned him the Pulitzer Prize and sold five million copies worldwide. Seething with the bitter details of his family's abject poverty and the humiliating sacrifices his mother made in her struggle to raise the children, McCourt's memoir hit a sensitive nerve that earned him the admiration of the public eye. In this premiere profile McCourt reflects upon the poverty of his youth and discusses the adverse reactions the people of Limerick and the Irish Catholic Church have had to his memoir. Featuring interviews with his brother Malachy McCourt reminiscing about their childhood and archival footage of New York and Limerick, this film gives McCourt a chance to defend the often criticized depictions of life in Angela's Ashes through his speculation as to how his mother might have reacted to his triumphant rise to fame and his honest portrayal of their difficult life in Ireland.