Pat Conroy obituary

Pat Conroy, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 70, wrote a remarkable series of books that strip-mined the bitter memories of his early years in South Carolina. Four of them were made into films, including The Prince of Tides, starring Barbra Streisand, which had seven Oscar nominations, The Great Santini, for which Michael O’Keefe and Robert Duvall received Oscar nominations playing characters based on Conroy and his abusive father, and The Water Is Wide, which became the movie Conrack, starring Jon Voight.

“One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family,” Conroy said. If so, he had gifts in abundance. Born in Atlanta, the first of seven children, to Donald, a Marine Corps fighter pilot, and Peggy, a housewife, he had an unsettled early life growing up on a series of military bases, mostly in the south, before the family finally put down roots in Beaufort, South Carolina when he was 15. His father, who because of his acrobatic flying skills had nicknamed himself The Great Santini, after a trapeze artist, was both physically and emotionally abusive, which took its toll on the family. “I still carry the freight of that childhood every day,” wrote his son.

Pat took refuge in playing basketball, and his fierce contests at home against his father were chronicled memorably in The Great Santini. To please his father he went to The Citadel, South Carolina’s state military college, on a basketball scholarship. His memoir, My Losing Season (2002), recalls the importance of sport to his life: “if not for sport, I don’t think my father would have talked to me,” he said. After graduation he started teaching in Beaufort; My Losing Season also deals with the guilt he felt for cowardice in dodging the draft in the Vietnam war, in which many of his classmates died. His first book was a self-published collection of stories, The Boo, centered on the colonel who was head of discipline at The Citadel.

Conroy’s first wife, Barbara Jones, was a neighbour in Beaufort whose husband was a pilot killed in Vietnam. Barbara had two children by her first husband; she and Pat then had a daughter, Megan, of their own. He moved to Daufuskie Island in South Carolina, teaching in an isolated, mainly black, community that was cut off from the mainland. His unconventional style clashed with the local administration and he was fired after a year. The Water Is Wide (1972), his book about that year, won an award from the National Education Association; Conrack was released two years later.

The Great Santini, which told the story of a father who abuses his family, was published in 1976; ​his mother submitted the novel as evidence in her divorce from his father. The book sparked further rifts within the family as relatives picketed his South Carolina book signings. The resultant strains were a factor in his divorce from Barbara the following year, but oddly they improved relations with his father, called Colonel Bull Meecham in the novel. His father at first claimed the book would be read only by “psychiatrists, homosexuals, extreme liberals and women”, but, as Conroy wrote in his 2013 memoir, The Death of Santini, he eventually decided to treat his portrayal as fictional, and warmed to it. He turned his behaviour around and became a changed man. “After my mother divorced him he had the best second act I ever saw,” said Conroy. “He became the best uncle, the best brother, the best grandfather, the best friend.”

Conroy’s next novel, The Lords of Discipline (1980), returned to the Citadel and material he’d used in the stories of The Boo. It too was filmed, in 1984, directed by Franc Roddam with English locations standing in for the southern college. The next year Conroy married Lenore Fleischer, who again brought two children with her; they also had their own daughter, Susannah, from whom Conroy later became estranged and to whom he dedicated books saying “the door is always open and so is my heart”.

In 1986 he published The Prince Of Tides, drawing on the psychological problems of one of his sisters, Carol Ann, who thereafter cut herself off from him. The book sold more than 5m copies, and the film, for which Conroy had written the screenplay with Becky Johnson, starred and was directed by Barbra Streisand, with Nick Nolte as the Conroy character. Despite its seven Oscar nominations, it failed to win any, perhaps because the director may have tilted it somewhat toward its star.

Success was difficult for Conroy to handle. He moved to Europe, had a breakdown, and his marriage crumbled. It would be nearly a decade before the appearance of his next novel, Beach Music (1995), which required massive editing from a manuscript of more than 2,000 pages. The main character was a food writer living in Europe after his wife’s suicide who has to return home on the death of his mother from leukaemia (the disease that killed Conroy’s own mother).

On his Beach Music book tour he met his third wife, the novelist Cassandra King; they married in 1998, a week after his father’s death. He marvelled at her often joyful writing: “I’ve never cackled with laughter at a single line I’ve ever written,” he explained. “None of it has given me pleasure.”

His fifth and final novel, South of Broad (2009), was another sprawling family saga, whose main character, the newspaper columnist Leopold Bloom King, remembers a troubled childhood as he wrestles with current day family problems. Last year, on his 70th birthday, Conroy noted: “I’ve spent my whole life trying to find out who I am and I don’t believe I’ve even come close.”

He is survived by Cassandra, by his two daughters, and by four stepchildren.