Beach Music is about Jack McCall, an American living in Rome with his young daughter, trying to find peace after the recent trauma of his wife’s suicide. But his solitude is disturbed by the appearance of his sister-in-law, who begs him to return home, and of two school friends asking for his help in tracking down another classmate who went underground as a Vietnam protester...
Fierce and fearsome, Col. Bull Meecham is an ace Marine fighter pilot,a legend to his men and known to one and all as “The Great Santini.” For Meecham’s family — especially his sensitive older son Ben, who is on the verge of manhood — the dark side of the legend is all too real. Pat Conroy’s 1976 novel The Great Santini tells their story, an unforgettable portrait of a family...
Years before the venerable South Carolina military academy known as The Citadel became a center of controversy, novelist Pat Conroy drew on his experience there to fabricate a rich and deeply compelling novel called The Lords of Discipline. Published in 1980, it tells the story of four cadets at a fictional academy called the Carolina Military Institute. The young men forge a...
A fractured Southern family that “fate tested a thousand times” comes robustly to life in Pat Conroy’s novel The Prince of Tides. Published in 1986, this powerful and immensely satisfying family saga resonates with the author’s own life and experience. The novel follows the painful but liberating emotional journey of Tom Wingo, who travels to New York from his native South...
The South that is real to the novelist Pat Conroy is a lush and seductive place, but one that is haunted by violence, ignorance and oppression. The first of his books, The Water Is Wide (1972), is an account his personal experience as an idealistic young man trying to do the right thing in a forgotten corner of the South that is both beautiful and sad. Having failed to secure a...
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