Remembering Pat Conroy, a teacher who uses his tortured life to tell stories

Pat Conroy, the beloved author of The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides, has died. Conroy - who announced last month that he had pancreatic cancer - died Friday night at his home between his family in Beaufort, South Carolina was 70 years old.

Pat Conroy was a master storyteller, mixing the raw material of his difficult family life with the landscape of the coast of South Carolina. In 1986, Conroy told me that the reason he wrote was to explain his own life for himself.

"The writing has not been therapeutic for me, but it has been essential," he said in an interview for tomorrow's edition. "I've written about my mother, my father, my family ... and if I get it on paper, I called the devil."

The most famous work of Conroy's The Prince of Tides, a novel about a Native problem of South Carolina telling his story to a psychiatrist in New York.

The prologue begins: "My wound is geography."

I was born and raised in a Carolina sea island and I had the sun in the lowlands, inked in dark gold, back and shoulders. As a child I was happy above the channels, navigating a small boat between the sandbars with their quiet nation of oysters exposed on the flats brown in the low water mark.

Nan Talese was editor Pat Conroy over the past 35 years, beginning with The Prince of Tides - a period that saw an increase in sales of books Conroy to a total of 20 million copies worldwide.

She remembers the first thing I told him when they met. "He said, '.. I'll tell you, if there are ten words for something, I will use all ten Their job is to carry them out'"

Talese said Conroy touched people with their language and honesty

"His incredible sense of empathy with people. ... He believes that his books influenced many people because it was so open and honest. And it really touched their hearts."

Pat Conroy was born in 1945 in Atlanta. It was a "military brat." He describes himself His family moved every year until settled in Beaufort when he was 12 years old.

In his 1976 book The Great Santini, Conroy wrote about his relationship with his abusive father, a Navy aviator. In the 1979 film version of the story, the father is played by Robert Duvall. In one scene, that her four small children after a movement is directed, like soldiers under his command.

After high school, Pat Conroy's father sent his eldest son to the Citadel, Charleston floors military academy, where Pat began writing fiction. Conroy said his ability to tell stories natural was not affected by literary theory.

"I missed all classes in the art of fiction," Conroy said in 1986. "We had no. I'm fine in military science. But I've lost all classes" Is this a great technique for fiction ? 'I never knew anything like that. "

His training as a writer came elsewhere.

"I came from a family of great storytellers," he said. . "That's something the South I think it has retained the thread, history, and the possibility of having either one, is a well-liked in several of my uncles and aunts feature and a great story changes the world for you -. Changes the way you see life. "

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