On the heels of Santini's success, The Lords of Discipline - a thriller that involved a secret fraternity carrying out the covert agenda of a repressive and racist Southern military college - was also adapted for the screen and made the paperback bestseller lists of both the New York Times and Publishers Weekly as a result.Ĭonroy's next book, The Prince of Tides, drew literary critics' praise and lifted him into the top ranks of successful American novelists. Actor Robert Duvall's Academy Award-nominated appearance in the movie role of Colonel 'Bull' Meecham - the eponymous 'Great Santini,' and the fictionalized representation of Conroy's own father - became an iconic Hollywood performance. A successful Hollywood adaptation of The Great Santini, a coming-of-age story of a young man and his love-hate relationship with his abusive, Marine fighter pilot father, secured Conroy's fame.

The book was successfully adapted twice by Hollywood: first, as a feature film ( Conrack) in 1974, and again in 2006, as a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie,under the original title.Ĭonroy's next novels enjoyed increasing commercial success, elevating the author to best-seller status. The Water is Wide, Conroy's next book, recorded his turbulent year as an backwoods elementary school teacher on rural, isolated Daufuskie Island. The Boo, his first book, was composed by Conroy as a tribute to a beloved assistant commandant at the Charleston military college he attended, The Citadel. Critics often note that Conroy's writing - like that of Thomas Wolfe, an acknowledged influence - favors expansive, lyrical prose, and his stories center upon family dramas that play out amid a strong sense of place.Ĭonroy's peripatetic military family settled in Beaufort, South Carolina, when he was in high school and the 'Coastal Kingdom' between Charleston and Savannah often plays a prominent role in his works. Meanwhile they struggle to survive family tragedy and attempt to emerge from emotional and external turmoils with a wounded, imperfect sense of self and belonging. His father's harsh emotional and physical and violence toward the family became 'the central fact of my art and my life.' Torn by conflicting loyalties and emotions, Conroy's heroes rebel against oppressive situations and institutions that are ruled by exclusive, rigid concepts of manhood, school and race. Pat Conroy's bestselling novels made the Atlanta-born writer one of the most highly praised, most widely-known Georgia authors of the last half-century.ĭonald Patrick Conroy grew up as the oldest son of an autocratic military man and a mother who instilled in him a love of literature and language.

South of broad author