He returns to New York City, where he breaks up with Emma, preferring to be single in New York, going out drinking with his pals. Army status, pleasure at the better life of his youngest brother who attends secondary school, and the hard memories of his own life there, the 'dark clouds' in his mind.īecause he has a girlfriend, Emma, in New York City, he leaves the army at his earliest opportunity, being commended for his exceptional service as a clerk-typist by his superior officers.

His emotions while in Limerick are strongly mixed, between pride in his U.S. He has been sending part of his Army wages to his mother, and she has gained a home with all the modern advantages of plumbing, a refrigerator and space for a garden in the Janesboro neighborhood she does not move out of the slum house shared with her brother, where she was raised, until Frank arrives. While in the Army in Germany, he gets two weeks leave to visit his family in Ireland, seeing his mother and youngest brothers Michael and Alphie in Limerick, and for one day, his father and paternal grandmother in Toome. The people in the Army teach him a lot about American ways, so different from his upbringing in the lanes of Limerick. Frank has a troubling encounter with a poor and hungry girl in a refugee camp. Soldiers are always looking for women, trading their cigarette and coffee allotments for sex, even with refugees from WWII who are still not settled, which the Army disapproves of. Army facilities at Dachau, a haunting experience, both for a Jewish soldier with him and for Frank, who heard all the news of World War II growing up in Limerick. When serving as company clerk, he delivers laundry to U.S.

During his time in southern Germany, he meets men from all over the U.S. He is drafted into the US Army because of the Korean War he is sent to Europe, and rises to the rank of corporal. He spends time there and checks out books from the start. The New York City public library is a wonder to him, with its welcoming ways.

Friendless and clueless about American customs, he struggles to integrate himself into American blue-collar society, working at laboring jobs while spending his free time reading books. The book begins as McCourt lands upriver from New York City, and quickly makes his way to New York City with an Irish-American priest on the ship. Published in 1999, it begins where McCourt ended Angela's Ashes, his Pulitzer Prize winning memoir of his impoverished childhood in Ireland and his return to America. 'Tis is a memoir written by Frank McCourt of his time learning how to live in New York City.

'Tis by Frank McCourt