Angela's Ashes Essay | Critical Essay #2

Angela's Ashes Critical Essay #2

Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses the portrayal of McCourt's family in Angela's Ashes.

On the opening page of his riveting memoir, Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt describes his "miserable Irish Catholic childhood":

the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the .re; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.

The perils of Frankie's childhood read like a laundry list of stereotypical suffering; however, as Michiko Kakutani so correctly writes in her review for the New York Times, "There is not a trace of bitterness or resentment in Angela's Ashes, though there is plenty a less generous writer might well be judgmental about." Frankie and his brothers grow up in a...
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