Tis: A Memoir

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. There
he falls in love with the quintessential Yankee
long-legged and blonde and tries to live his dream. But it
is not until he starts to teach—and to write—that Frank
finds his place in the world. The same vulnerable but
invincible spirit that captured the hearts of readers in
Angela’s Ashes comes of age. As Malcolm Jones said in his
Newsweek review of Angela’s Ashes “It is only the best
storyteller who can so beguile his readers that he leaves
them wanting more when he is done…and McCourt proves
himself one of the very best.” Frank McCourts ’Tis is one
of the most eagerly awaited books of our time and it is a
masterpiece.