Pat Conroy - Writing Career

Writing Career

Conroy is a graduate of The Citadel, and his experiences there provided the basis for two of his best-known works, the novel The Lords of Discipline and the memoir My Losing Season. The latter details his senior year on the school's underdog basketball team, which won the longest game in the history of Southern Conference basketball against rival Virginia Military Institute in quadruple overtime in 1967.

His first book, The Boo, is a collection of anecdotes about cadet life centering on Lt. Colonel Thomas N. Courvoisie, who had served as Assistant Commandant of Cadets at The Citadel from 1961 to 1968 (Courvoisie appears as the fictional character Colonel Thomas Berrineau, a.k.a. "The Bear," in The Lords Of Discipline). After completing The Boo, Conroy couldn't find a publisher for the book, so he self-published it.

After graduating from The Citadel, Conroy taught English in Beaufort, South Carolina. While there he met and married Barbara Jones, a young widow of the Vietnam War who had two children (whom he adopted). He then accepted a job teaching children in a one-room schoolhouse on remote Daufuskie Island, South Carolina.

Conroy was fired at the conclusion of his first year on the island for his unconventional teaching practices, including his refusal to use corporal punishment on students, and for his lack of respect for the school's administration. Conroy wrote his book The Water Is Wide based on his experiences as a teacher. The book won Conroy a humanitarian award from the National Education Association and was made into a feature film, Conrack, starring Jon Voight in 1974. Hallmark produced a television version of the book in 2006.

In 1976, Conroy published his first novel, The Great Santini. The main character of the novel is Marine fighter pilot Colonel "Bull" Meecham, who dominates and terrorizes his family. Bull Meecham also psychologically abuses his teenage son Ben. The character is based on Conroy's father Donald. (According to My Losing Season, Donald Conroy was even worse than the character depicted in Santini.)

The Great Santini caused friction within the Conroy family, who felt that he had betrayed family secrets by writing about his father. Members of his mother's family would picket Conroy's book signings, passing out pamphlets asking people not to buy the novel. The friction contributed to the failure of his first marriage. However, the book also eventually helped repair Conroy's relationship with his father, and they became very close. His father, looking to prove that he was not like the character in the book, changed his manners drastically. According to Conroy, his father would often sign copies of his son's novels as "Donald Conroy - The Great Santini. I hope you enjoy my son's work of fiction!" The novel was made into a film of the same name in 1979, starring Robert Duvall.

Publication of The Lords of Discipline in 1980 upset many of his fellow graduates of The Citadel, who felt that his portrayal of campus life was highly unflattering. The rift was not healed until 2000, when Conroy was awarded an honorary degree and asked to deliver the commencement address the following year. As Pat Conroy says in the novel, "I wear the ring", meaning that as a graduate of the Citadel, he has a right to comment on it.

In 1986, Conroy published what is arguably his most acclaimed and well-known novel, The Prince of Tides. The book tells the story of Tom Wingo, an unemployed South Carolina teacher who goes to New York City to help his sister, Savannah, a poet who has attempted suicide, to come to terms with their past. Again, the novel was made into a film of the same name in 1991, starring Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand.

In 1995, Conroy published Beach Music, a novel about an American ex-patriate living in Rome who returns to South Carolina upon news of his mother's terminal illness. The story reveals his attempt to confront personal demons, including the suicide of his wife, the subsequent custody battle with his in-laws over their daughter, and the attempt by a film-making friend to rekindle old friendships which were compromised during the days of the Vietnam War.

In 2009, Conroy published South of Broad, which again uses the familiar backdrop of Charleston following the suicide of newspaperman Leo King's brother, and alternates narratives of a diverse group of friends between 1969 and 1989. His recent non-fiction work, The Pat Conroy Cookbook, is a collection of favorite recipes accompanied by stories about his life, including many stories of growing up in South Carolina.

Conroy's South Carolina experiences clearly show in all his work. Indeed, a critic compiling a list of the leading current practitioners of Southern narrative writing listed him in the same sentence as Fannie Flagg and John Kennedy Toole and in the same paragraph as Walker Percy and Eudora Welty.