Pat Conroy

Donald Patrick Conroy, known as Pat Conroy, was born on October 26, 1945, in Atlanta, Georgia, and died on March 4, 2016. He became one of the leading figures of late-20th-century American Southern literature, writing acclaimed novels and memoirs drawn closely from the places, institutions, conflicts, and family tensions he knew best. His books returned often to South Carolina, military life, fathers and sons, schools, sports, and the burden of memory.

Conroy was the eldest of seven children born to Marine Colonel Donald Conroy, a fighter pilot from Chicago, and Frances “Peggy” Peek of Alabama. Because of his father’s military career, Conroy moved often as a child and had attended 11 schools by the time he was 15. He later said that his life as a military brat shaped his stories in both positive and negative ways. His family eventually settled in Beaufort, South Carolina, where he finished high school. During his senior year, Ann Head became a mentor and influenced his future writing.

He attended The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, in Charleston, where he graduated from the Corps of Cadets as an English major and played basketball. The Citadel supplied the basis for two of his best-known works: the novel The Lords of Discipline and the memoir My Losing Season. His first book, The Boo, grew out of cadet life and centered on Lt. Colonel Thomas Nugent Courvousie, who had served as Assistant Commandant of Cadets. Conroy began it in 1968 after Courvousie was removed from that post, and he borrowed money from a bank to self-publish it.

After graduating, Conroy taught English in Beaufort, where he met and married Barbara Jones, a young widow of the Vietnam War who was pregnant with her second child. He later taught children in a one-room schoolhouse on remote Daufuskie Island, South Carolina. He was fired after one year for unconventional teaching practices, including refusing to use corporal punishment, and for his lack of respect for the school administration. From that experience came The Water Is Wide, which won a humanitarian award from the National Education Association and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. It was adapted as the 1974 film Conrack, starring Jon Voight, and as a Hallmark television version in 2006.

Conroy’s family history fed some of his most widely read fiction. The Great Santini, published in 1976, centered on Marine fighter pilot Colonel “Bull” Meecham, a character based on Conroy’s father, whose physical and emotional abuse marked Conroy’s youth. The novel caused friction in the family but later helped repair Conroy’s relationship with his father, who changed his behavior. The 1979 film version starred Robert Duvall. The Lords of Discipline, published in 1980, upset many Citadel graduates, though the school later awarded Conroy an honorary degree in 2000 and asked him to deliver the next year’s commencement address. The Prince of Tides, published in 1986, became a 1991 Barbra Streisand film nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

In later books such as Beach Music in 1995 and My Losing Season in 2002, Conroy kept returning to loss, family, friendship, basketball, and the long reach of youth. His writing still speaks because it came from lived conflict: a harsh home, military discipline, classrooms, team sports, and the South Carolina coast. He turned private pain and public institutions into stories many readers could recognize, even when the details were fiercely his own.