McCourt was born in New York City, in 1930, to Irish immigrants. When he was four years old, his family moved back to Ireland, where he grew up in impoverished circumstances. At age 19, having saved his money from various jobs, he sailed for New York and resided there for the rest of his life. In 1951, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served two years before returning to New York. There he worked and enrolled at New York University with the help of the G.I Bill. He graduated with a B.A. in English in 1957 and began his teaching career the following year. In the 1960s, he earned his master’s degree from Brooklyn College and began a doctoral program at Trinity College in Dublin, which he didn’t complete. He began teaching at Stuyvesant High School in 1971, retiring from there in 1987.

In 1996, McCourt published Angela’s Ashes, a memoir of his first 19 years of life. It was a surprise bestseller and won a National Book Critics Circle Award that year and a Pulitzer Prize the following year. He followed that up three years later with ’Tis, another memoir, which picked up where his first book left off.