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Birth of Irish American Writer Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy, Irish American writer who authors twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and post-apocalyptic genres, is born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933. He is known for his graphic depictions of violence and his unique writing style, recognizable by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists.

McCarthy is one of six children born into the Irish Catholic family of Gladys Christina McGrail and Charles Joseph McCarthy. Although he is born in Rhode Island, he is raised primarily in Tennessee where his father works as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. He attends St. Mary’s Parochial School and Knoxville Catholic High School and is an altar boy at Knoxville‘s Church of the Immaculate Conception. In 1951, he enrolls at the University of Tennessee, but drops out to join the United States Air Force.

McCarthy’s debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, is published in 1965. Awarded literary grants, he is able to travel to southern Europe, where he writes his second novel, Outer Dark (1968). Suttree (1979), like his other early novels, receives generally positive reviews, but is not a commercial success. A MacArthur Fellowship enables him to travel to the American Southwest, where he researches and writes his fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985). Although it initially garners a lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since been regarded as his magnum opus, with some labeling it the Great American Novel.

McCarthy first experiences widespread success with All the Pretty Horses (1992), for which he receives both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), completing The Border Trilogy. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men receives mixed reviews. His 2006 novel The Road wins the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

Many of McCarthy’s works have been adapted into film. The 2007 film adaptation of No Country for Old Men is a critical and commercial success, winning four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The films All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and Child of God are also adapted from his works of the same names, and Outer Dark is turned into a 15-minute short. He has a play adapted into a 2011 film, The Sunset Limited.

McCarthy works with the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center, where he publishes the essay “The Kekulé Problem” (2017), which explores the human unconscious and the origin of language. He is elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2012. His final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, are published on October 25, 2022, and December 6, 2022, respectively.

McCarthy dies of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on June 13, 2023, aged 89. Stephen King says McCarthy is “maybe the greatest American novelist of my time … He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing.”


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Birth of Frank McCourt, Teacher & Writer

frank-mccourt

Francis “Frank” McCourt, Irish American teacher and writer, is born in New York City‘s Brooklyn borough on August 19, 1930.

McCourt is born to Malachy McCourt, Sr., who falsely claims to have been in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence, and Irish Catholic mother Angela Sheehan from Limerick. In the midst of the Great Depression, the family moves back to Ireland. Unable to find steady work in Belfast or Dublin and beset by his father’s alcoholism, the family returns to their mother’s native Limerick, where they sink even deeper into poverty.

In October 1949, at the age of 19, McCourt leaves Ireland, taking a boat from Cork to New York City. In 1951, he is drafted during the Korean War and sent to Bavaria for two years initially training dogs, then as a clerk. Upon his discharge from the US Army, he returned to New York City, where he held a series of jobs on docks, in warehouses, and in banks. Using his G.I. Bill education benefits, he talks his way into New York University by claiming he is intelligent and reads a great deal. He is admitted on one year’s probation provided he maintains a B average. He graduates in 1957 from NYU with a bachelor’s degree in English.

A New York city schoolteacher for more than thirty years, McCourt achieves literary fame later in life with his best-selling childhood memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood, Angela’s Ashes. With a first printing of just 25,000 copies, the book becomes an instant favourite with critics and readers and is perhaps the ultimate case of the non-celebrity memoir, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.

McCourt wins the annual Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1997 and one of the annual National Book Critics Circle Awards for the book, which is eventually published in 25 languages and 30 countries. It is a bestseller and makes him a millionaire. Three years later, a movie version of Angela’s Ashes opens to mixed reviews with Northern Irish actor Michael Legge playing McCourt as a teenager.

McCourt is also the author of ‘Tis (1999), which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of Angela’s Ashes and focusing on his life after returning to New York. He subsequently writes Teacher Man (2005) which details his teaching experiences and the challenges of being a teacher.

McCourt writes the book for a 1997 musical entitled The Irish…and How They Got That Way, which features an eclectic mix of Irish music – everything from the traditional Danny Boy to U2‘s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.

It is announced in May 2009 that McCourt has been treated for melanoma and that he is in remission, undergoing home chemotherapy. On July 19, 2009, he dies from the cancer, with meningeal complications, at a hospice in Manhattan, New York City.