'Tis

First lines

When the MS Irish Oak sailed from Cork in October 1949, we expected to be in New York City in a week.

About this book

A #1 New York Times bestseller and the eagerly anticipated sequel to the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angela’s Ashes, this masterpiece from Frank McCourt tells of his American journey from impoverished immigrant to brilliant teacher and raconteur. Frank McCourt’s glorious childhood memoir, Angela’s Ashes, has been loved and celebrated by readers everywhere for its spirit, its wit and its profound humanity. A tale of redemption, in which storytelling itself is the source of salvation, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Rarely has a book so swiftly found its place on the literary landscape. And now we have ’Tis, the story of Frank’s American journey from impoverished immigrant to brilliant teacher and raconteur. Frank lands in New York at age nineteen, in the company of a priest he meets on the boat. He gets a job at the Biltmore Hotel, where he immediately encounters the vivid hierarchies of this “classless country,” and then is drafted into the army and is sent to Germany to train dogs and type reports. It is Frank’s incomparable voice—his uncanny humor and his astonishing ear for dialogue—that renders these experiences spellbinding. When Frank returns to America in 1953, he works on the docks, always resisting what everyone tells him, that men and women who have dreamed and toiled for years to get to America should “stick to their own kind” once they arrive. Somehow, Frank knows that he should be getting an education, and though he left school at fourteen, he talks his way into New York University. The…

Themes & subjects

About the author

Frank McCourt

August 19, 1930 – July 19, 2009

Francis "Frank" McCourt was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize (1997) and National Book Critics Circle Award (1996) for his memoir *Angela's Ashes* (1996), which details his childhood as a poor Irish Catholic in Limerick. He is also the author of *'Tis* (1999), which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of the previous book and focusing on life as a new immigrant in America. *Teacher Man* (2005) detailed the challenges of being a young, uncertain teacher who must impart knowledge to his students. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Western Ontario.