[1] Frank McCourt was born in New York City's Brooklyn borough, on August 19, 1930, the eldest child of Irish Catholic immigrants Malachy Gerald McCourt, Sr. (October 11, 1899  – January 11, 1985), of Toome, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, who was aligned with the IRA during the Irish War of Independence, and Angela Sheehan (January 1, 1908 – December 27, 1981) from Limerick.

Unable to find steady work in Belfast or Dublin and beset by Malachy Senior's alcoholism, the McCourt family returned to their mother's native Limerick, where they sank even deeper into poverty.

[3] They lived in a rain-soaked slum, the parents and children sharing one bed together, McCourt's father drinking away what little money they had.

McCourt related that when he was 11, his father left Limerick to find work in the factories of wartime Coventry, England, rarely sending back money to support his family.

McCourt recounts that eventually Malachy Senior abandoned Frank's mother altogether, leaving her to raise her four surviving children, on the edge of starvation, without any source of income.

[3] Frank felt obliged as a child to steal bread, milk, and lemonade in an effort to provide for his mother and three younger brothers, until relatives stepped in to aid the family.

Frank's formal education in Limerick ended at age 13,[3] when the Irish Christian Brothers rejected him as a student in their secondary school.

Less formally and in secret, he wrote debt-collection letters for a local Limerick woman who paid for clothing and other items and allowed debtors to make payments with high interest rates.

Bill education benefits, McCourt talked his way into New York University by explaining that he was intelligent and read a great deal; they admitted him on one year's probation provided he maintained a B average.

Many Limerick natives, including Gerry Hannan and Richard Harris,[3][12] accused McCourt of greatly exaggerating his family's impoverished upbringing and hammering his mother.

McCourt's own mother denied the accuracy of his stories shortly before her death in 1981, shouting from the audience during a stage performance of his recollections that it was "all a pack of lies.

[14] Many of his Stuyvesant High School students remembered quite clearly the mordant childhood anecdotes he continually told during sessions of his senior-level Creative Writing (E7W-E8W) elective.

[3] He married his third wife, Ellen Frey McCourt, on August 13, 1994, in Milford, Pennsylvania, five years after meeting at the Lion's Head bar in New York City.

[23] After the unexpected critical and financial success of his first memoir, McCourt and his wife settled in two homes, "their two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, across the street from the Museum of Natural History.

Then there's a converted barn that sits on 25 wooded acres in Roxbury, Conn."[25] It was announced in May 2009 that McCourt had been treated for melanoma and that he was in remission, undergoing home chemotherapy.

On July 18, 2017, eight years after his death, his daughter Maggie spread her share of the ashes in Limerick, travelling there with her two sons, Jack and Avery, and his widow Ellen McCourt.

[30] The Frank McCourt Museum on Hartstonge St in Limerick at the former Leamy's National School building has since closed, in October 2019, after 10 years in operation.