Angela's Ashes author McCourt dies

NEW YORK: Frank McCourt, the Irish American author best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes that chronicled his impoverished upbringing, died on Sunday, The New York Times reported. He was 78.

The newspaper said the cause was metastatic melanoma, according to an executive of Scribner, the author's publisher.

A school teacher who came to writing late in life, McCourt won acclaim with his poignant, extraordinarily bleak picture of a childhood growing up in the slums of the Irish city Limerick.