Frank McCourt was born in NY, where his parents met and married and had several children, but the family returned to Ireland when he was four. Frank later returned to America when he was 19. For many years, he was an English teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. After losing siblings to starvation in Limerick, he said that upon being "assigned to cafeteria duty," patrolling the students' lunchroom, watching them complain about the food, dump untouched food into the garbage only to sneak out of school to various fast-food joints in the neighborhood, I wanted to yell, 'Shut up, Eat your goddamn food. There are millions starving elsewhere this very minute.' He wanted to ransack the garbage, retrieve discarded food, warp it, ship it to Africa, India, Mexico. Frank wrote, "My mother (formerly a Sheehan) in our Limerick City slum, had neither food nor dishes. We lived mostly on bread and tea, a solid and a liquid, a balanced diet, and what more do you want?" Although his father professed to love his family, he was often out of work and irresponsibly squandered his money at the neighborhood pub. Being "from the north" (Co. Antrim) Frank's father was looked upon with suspicion, suffering great prejudice in his attempts to find employment, help for his family. Frank went on to say, "I recently wrote a book ("Angela's Ashes") in which hunger of the physical type is a major theme but I wanted to show the psychological effects of hunger, how it breaks you, how it hinders any kind of emotional development. You can think of nothing but your belly. You're an animal. When I was nine my mother got a job in Limerick cleaning a Judge's house. That Sunday we had boiled bacon, cabbage, boiled potatoes, and for dessert, jelly and custard. For the next day she saved three boiled potatoes and some jelly and custard and placed them on a window sill which served as the larder. Next day I was the first one home. I thought I'd taste the jelly and maybe the custard. I did. I thought I'd have half a potato. You can imagine the rest. I didn't stop till everything was gone. I ran away and slept in a hayloft outside Limerick. I could hardly sleep with the worry and the guilt and knew I had to go home." At the time Frank wrote his Pulitzer prize-winning "Angela's Ashes" (1996) he was living in CT. Frank wrote his autobiography from the perspective of a child - per a reviewer, "It is a chronicle of grown-ups at the mercy of life and children at the mercy of grown-ups, and it is such a marriage of pathos and humor that you never know whether to weep or roar, and find yourself doing both at one." Frank describes many places in Limerick - Leamy's National School, various buildings - in fact there is a photo of him on the school playground with his friends circa 1938. "Angela's Ashes" begins -- "Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick. The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year's Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges. It provoked cures galore; to ease the catarrh you boiled onions in milk blackened with pepper; for the congested passages you made a paste of boiled flour and nettles, wrapped it in a rag, and slapped it, sizzling, on the chest. From October to April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried; tweed and woolen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations. The rain drove us into the church--our refuge, our strength - our only dry place At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest drone, while steam rose again from our clothes to mingle with the sweetness of incense, flowers and candles. Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain."