Frank McCourt12: Did it ever occur to you that you were making an epic tale?

Did it ever occur to you that this was the makings of some epic tale?

Frank McCourt: Oh, no. Far from it. We were all ashamed of this. You didn't go out into the world announcing that you came from some slum. You don't find kids from the ghettos and the slums bragging about what they came from.
I remember reading James Baldwin talking about his mother fighting the cockroaches, trying to keep the kitchen clean, trying to keep things growing up in Harlem, and I said, "That's it. This man understands," because you read so little about poverty in American literature or any other literature. There was Dickens, I know, but Dickens -- I became suspicious of him because he had all those happy endings. I wish Oliver Twist had died of TB, or David Copperfield. That used to piss me off when they're all -- they all found out they were related to somebody in the Royal Family or some damn thing. So when I came across Baldwin and George Orwell's book Down and Out in Paris and London and another one called The Road to Wigan Pier, they had -- he knew. He knew the details, the stink of poverty.

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