Though the world will remember him for his haunting tale of a poverty- wracked childhood in Ireland, Frank McCourt was very much a New Yorker: Brooklyn-born, educated at NYU and Brooklyn College, a city teacher for 30 years and a denizen of the local literary watering holes.

McCourt, who died Sunday at 78, was convinced that someone who taught creative writing — as he did at Stuyvesant HS — should try writing himself.

And so, after retiring from the classroom, he put down on paper his memories of the pains of growing up in the slums of Depression-era Limerick.

“Angela’s Ashes” proved a literary phenomenon; it won the Pulitzer Prize, sold millions of copies and has been published in 25 languages and 30 countries. And it turned McCourt, then in his mid-60s, into a celebrity.

People “actually looked at me,” he once recalled. “People I had known for years. And they were friendly, and they looked at me in a different way. And I was thinking, ‘All those years I was a teacher, why didn’t you look at me like that then?’ ”

A good question — and a reminder that the best teachers, as McCourt’s students said he surely was, don’t always get the recognition they deserve.