RIP Pat Conroy

[LadyVer]

I read most of his books, and wrote a secondary ed essay on The Water is Wide in the late 90s, relating to language and dialects. His writing about family dynamics, southern culture, and teaching made an impact on me. (I lasted one day in student teaching when the thought What the Hell Was I Thinking crossed my mind).

 

[NOIRTRASH]

No one has ever said, I LEARNED IT ALL FROM PAT CONROY. He'll be forgotten in a week. It's common to read, I LEARNED IT ALL FROM RAYMOND CHANDLER. Conroy, like Maya Angelou, will live on at colleges, in glass cases, like Lenin and Stalin at the Kremlin.

 

[NaokoSmith]

They sound like interesting books. I haven't come across his writing before, and will look out for his work.

 

[SarahsHooters]

I've only ever read 'Prince of Tides' but I loved it, and a lot of Savannah's ramblings really stick in my mind. Will seek out some more of his work.

 

[trysail]

"She will die the way all old people in America die— of loneliness, boredom and neglect."

Pat Conroy
The Prince Of Tides
Boston, MA. 1986.
​

​

 

[trysail]

...There have been hundreds of novels about the Civil War, but Gone With The Wind stands like an obelisk in the dead center of American letters casting its uneasy shadow over all of us. It hooked into the sweet-smelling attar that romance always lends to the cause of a shamed and defeated people. Millions of Southerners lamented the crushing defeat of the Southern armies, but only one had the talent to place that elegaic sense of dissolution on the white shoulders of the most irresistable, spiderous, seditious, and wonderful of American heroines, Scarlett O'Hara...

-Pat Conroy
My Reading Life
New York, N.Y. 2010.
​

​