Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy was an American novelist whose fiction drew steadily on his upbringing in a violent military household and on the landscape of the South Carolina Lowcountry. His best-known novels include The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, and Beach Music, and several were adapted into films that reached audiences far beyond his core readership.

Born in Atlanta in 1945 as the eldest of seven children, he moved frequently as his Marine Corps fighter-pilot father was reassigned. He attended The Citadel in Charleston, a military college whose culture he later anatomised in The Lords of Discipline, and graduated in 1967. He taught for a year at a one-room school on Daufuskie Island and turned that experience into the memoir The Water Is Wide.

His 1976 novel The Great Santini, a thinly veiled account of his father, strained family relationships for years, although he and his father later reconciled. The Prince of Tides, published in 1986, sold several million copies and was adapted in 1991 into a film directed by and starring Barbra Streisand, with Nick Nolte receiving an Academy Award nomination.

He continued to publish memoir and fiction into his sixties, including My Losing Season on his college basketball years and South of Broad. He died of pancreatic cancer in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 2016, the town that anchors much of his fictional world.

The forename Pat is most often a short form of Patrick, from the Latin Patricius, meaning a member of the Roman patrician class. He used the short form publicly throughout his life, and his books are the reason many American readers most readily attach the name to a man writing about fathers, sons, and the southern coast.