Donald Patrick Conroy (1945 –2016) was an American novelist and memoirist. Conroy was born on October 26th, 1945, in Atlanta, Georgia. His childhood changed him, and it played a role in many of his novels, including The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini.
Conroy had a difficult childhood as his father was abusive and violent.
He attended the Citadel Military Academy in South Carolina, where he decided to try writing for the first time. Soon after he published his very first book, “The Boo,” about his favorite teacher.
Conroy decided to become a teacher after graduating from the academy.
The cruelties he saw there inspired his next book, a memoir titled “The Water is Wide.”
Conroy’s novel The Great Santini was published in 1976. It revolves around a family drama about Colonel “Bull” Meecham, a Marine fighter pilot, who terrorizes his family and son. Conroy’s father, Donald, inspired the character.
The Great Santini sparked controversy within the Conroy family. They felt he had disrespected the family by writing about his father. His first marriage failed as a result of this. However, the book ultimately helped Conroy rebuild his relationship with his father, who changed his ways, to demonstrate that he wasn’t like the character in the novel.
Conroy announced in February 2016, that he was under treatment for pancreatic cancer. He died on March 4th, 2016, at the age of 70.
Pat Conroy Books in order
Standalone Novel
- The Boo (1970)
- The Great Santini (1976)
- The Lords of Discipline (1980)
- The Prince of Tides (1986)
- Beach Music (1995)
- South of Broad (2009)
Standalone Non-fiction
- The Water is Wide (1972)
- My Losing Season (2002)
- The Pat Conroy Cookbook (2004)
- My Life in Books / My Reading Life (2010)
- The Death of Santini (2013)
- A Lowcountry Heart (2016)
Similar authors
- Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds focuses on the robust and romantic saga of the Cleary family, set in Drogheda, a vast Australian sheep station.
- John Irving’s The Cider House Rules follows Homer Wells as he leaves a World War II-era orphanage and comes of age, after growing up under the guidance of Dr. Wilbur Larch, an obstetrician, and abortionist.
See also: Ben Coes Books in Order.
Most recommended books
- The Lords of Discipline (4.32 Goodreads score)
- The Prince of Tides (4.24 Goodreads score)
- Beach Music (4.17 Goodreads score)
- The Great Santini (4.15 Goodreads score)
- The Water is Wide (4.15 Goodreads score)
Awards
Among many other awards, Conroy won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award in 2005.
Movies based on the series
Several of Pat Conroy’s books were turned into movies, including The Water is Wide, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, and The Great Santini. The latter two received Academy Award nominations.
Latest releases
The last book published by Pat Conroy is A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life, released in 2016.
Book summaries
The Boo (1970)
Lt. Col. Nugent Courvoisie, known to the cadets as “the Boo,” is an imposing and inspiring leader at the South Carolina military academy, the Citadel. A harsh disciplinarian but a compassionate mentor, he guides and inspires his young charges. Cadet Peter Cates is an anomaly. He is a gifted writer, a talented basketball player, and a good student, but his outward successes do little to impress his abusive father. The Boo takes Cates under his wing, but their bond is threatened when they’re forced to confront an act of violence on campus.
The Great Santini (1976)
Marine Col. Bull Meecham commands his home like a soldiers’ barracks. Cold and controlling, but also loving, Bull has complicated relationships with each member of his family—in particular, his eldest son, Ben. A born athlete who desperately seeks his father’s approval, Ben is determined to break out from the colonel’s shadow. With guidance from teachers at his new school, he strives to find the courage to stand up to his father once and for all.
The Lords of Discipline (1980)
As Will McLean begins his studies at the Carolina Military Institute, the American South is in turmoil over desegregation. An outsider to the harsh authoritarianism of the military, Will survives the school’s notorious freshman hazing, and avoids attention from its fabled and menacing secret society, the Ten. But when he is asked to mentor the school’s first black student, Will is drawn into the intense racial politics—and the threat of violence—simmering beneath the surface. Based on Conroy’s own military school experience and featuring his lush prose and richly drawn characters, The Lords of Discipline is a powerful story of a young man’s stand for justice and the friendship, love, and courage he finds along the way.
The Prince of Tides (1986)
Tom Wingo has lost his job, and is on the verge of losing his marriage, when he learns that his twin sister, Savannah, has attempted suicide again. At the behest of Savannah’s psychiatrist, Dr. Susan Lowenstein, Tom reluctantly leaves his home in South Carolina to travel to New York City and aid in his sister’s therapy.As Tom’s relationship with Susan deepens, he reveals to her the turbulent history of the Wingo family, and exposes the truth behind the fateful day that changed their lives forever.
Beach Music (1995)
A Southerner living abroad, Jack McCall is scarred by tragedy and betrayal. His desperate desire to find peace after his wife’s suicide draws him into a painful, intimate search for the one haunting secret in his family’s past that can heal his anguished heart. Spanning three generations and two continents, from the contemporary ruins of the American South to the ancient ruins of Rome, from the unutterable horrors of the Holocaust to the lingering trauma of Vietnam, Beach Music sings with life’s pain and glory. It is a novel of lyric intensity and searing truth, another masterpiece among Pat Conroy’s legendary and beloved novels.
South of Broad (2009)
Leopold Bloom King has been raised in a family shattered—and shadowed—by tragedy. Lonely and adrift, he searches for something to sustain him and finds it among a tightly knit group of outsiders. Surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, as well as Charleston, South Carolina’s dark legacy of racism and class divisions, these friends will endure until a final test forces them to face something none of them are prepared for. Spanning two turbulent decades, South of Broad is Pat Conroy at his finest: a masterpiece from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds.
The Water is Wide (1972)
Though the children of Yamacraw Island live less than two miles from the southern mainland, they can’t name the US president or the ocean that surrounds them. Most can’t read or write. Many of the students are the descendants of slaves, handicapped by poverty and isolation. When Pat Conroy arrives, an eager young teacher at the height of the civil rights movement, he finds a community still bound by the bitter effects of racism, but he is determined to broaden its members’ horizons and give them a voice.
My Losing Season (2002)
So begins Pat Conroy’s journey back to 1967 and his startling realization “that this season had been seminal and easily the most consequential of my life.” The place is the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, that now famous military college, and in memory Conroy gathers around him his team to relive their few triumphs and humiliating defeats. In a narrative that moves seamlessly between the action of the season and flashbacks into his childhood, we see the author’s love of basketball and how crucial the role of athlete is to all these young men who are struggling to find their own identity and their place in the world.
The Pat Conroy Cookbook (2004)
It all started thirty years ago with a chance purchase of The Escoffier Cookbook, an unlikely and daunting introduction for the beginner. But Conroy was more than up to the task. He set out with unwavering determination to learn the basics of French cooking—stocks and dough—and moved swiftly on to veal demi-glace and pâte brisée. With the help of his culinary accomplice, Suzanne Williamson Pollak, Conroy mastered the dishes of his beloved South as well as the cuisine he has savored in places as far away from home as Paris, Rome, and San Francisco.
My Life in Books / My Reading Life (2010)
In My Reading Life, Conroy revisits a life of reading through an array of wonderful and often surprising anecdotes: sharing the pleasures of the local library’s vast cache with his mother when he was a boy, recounting his decades-long relationship with the English teacher who pointed him onto the path of letters, and describing a profoundly influential period he spent in Paris, as well as reflecting on other pivotal people, places, and experiences. His story is a moving and personal one, girded by wisdom and an undeniable honesty. Anyone who not only enjoys the pleasures of reading but also believes in the power of books to shape a life will find here the greatest defense of that credo.
The Death of Santini (2013)
The Death of Santini is a heart-wrenching act of reckoning whose ultimate conclusion is that love can soften even the meanest of men, lending significance to the oft-quoted line from Pat’s novel The Prince of Tides: “In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.”
A Lowcountry Heart (2016)
This new volume of Pat Conroy’s nonfiction brings together some of the most charming interviews, magazine articles, speeches, and letters from his long literary career, many of them addressed directly to his readers with his habitual greeting, “Hey, out there.” Ranging across diverse subjects, such as favorite recent reads, the challenge of staying motivated to exercise, and processing the loss of dear friends, Conroy’s eminently memorable pieces offer a unique window into the life of a true titan of Southern writing.
