'Tis

Published in 1999, 'Tis takes up Frank McCourt's story where Angela's Ashes leaves it: a young man of nineteen arriving in New York with little more than a Limerick accent and an appetite for a life larger than the one he left behind.

It is a book about arrival and about becoming — about the distance between the person we are told we are and the person we choose to be. Tenney Diamond Productions is developing a new stage adaptation that carries McCourt's voice, at once rueful and irrepressible, into the intimacy of the theatre.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in the poverty of Limerick, Frank McCourt returned to America in 1949 to find a country that both welcomed and bewildered him. 'Tis follows him through menial work in Manhattan, service in the army, and his improbable admission to New York University without ever having finished secondary school.

Along the way he contends with the questions that shadow every immigrant life: where he belongs, what he owes to the family and the country he left, and whether a man shaped by hunger and shame can claim a place among the educated. The memoir carries him into the first uncertain years of a vocation — the classroom — that would define much of his life.

Frank McCourt received the Pulitzer Prize for Angela's Ashes, the memoir of his childhood that made him, in his sixties, one of the most widely read writers of his generation. 'Tis continues that autobiographical journey into adulthood, and Teacher Man completes it, turning to the three decades he spent teaching in New York City's public high schools.

Together the three books form one of the most celebrated memoir sequences in modern literature — a single life told with candour, comedy and grace.