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Translation rights to Pat Conroy backlist are available from Marly Rusoff
Literary Agency (with some exceptions noted below) 
BEACH MUSIC
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Publisher Doubleday,
1995
In BEACH MUSIC, Pat Conroy writes of the
dark memories that haunt generations, in a
story that spans South Carolina and Rome and
reaches back into the unutterable terrors of
the Holocaust.
Jack McCall is 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 and never resurfaced.
These requests launch Jack on a journey that
encompasses the past and the present in both
Europe and the American South, and that
leads him to shocking — and ultimately
liberation — truths. In Beach Music, he
tells of the dark memories that haunt
generations, in a story that spans South
Carolina and Rome and reaches back into the
unutterable terrors of the Holocaust.
Told with deep feeling and trademark Conroy
humor, BEACH MUSIC is a powerful and
compulsively readable novel.
(Rights Doubleday) |
THE PRINCE
OF TIDES
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Publisher Houghton
Mifflin, 1986
In this best-selling novel, Pat Conroy tells
the story of Tom Wingo, his twin sister,
Savannah, and the dark and violent past of
the family into which they were born.
Set in New York City and the low-country of
South Carolina, THE PRINCE OF TIDES opens
when Tom, a high school football coach whose
marriage and career are crumbling, flies
from South Carolina to New York after
learning of his twin sister's suicide
attempt. Savannah is one of the most gifted
poets of her generation, and both the
cadenced beauty of her art and the jumbled
cries of her illness are clues to the
too-long-hidden story of her wounded family.
In the paneled offices and luxurious
restaurants of New York City, Tom and Susan
Lowenstein, Savannah's psychiatrist, unravel
a history of violence, abandonment,
commitment, and love. And Tom realizes that
trying to save his sister is perhaps his
last chance to save himself.
With passion and a rare gift of language,
Pat Conroy moves from present to past,
tracing the amazing history of the Wingos
from World War II through the final days of
the war in Vietnam and into the 1980s,
drawing a rich range of characters: the
lovable, crazy Mr. Fruit, who for decades
has wordlessly directed traffic at the same
intersection in the southern town of
Colleton; Reese Newbury, the ruthless,
patrician land speculator who threatens the
Wingos’ only secure worldly possession,
Melrose Island; Herbert Woodruff, Susan
Lowenstein’s husband, a world-famous
violinist; Tolitha Wingo, Savannah's mentor
and eccentric grandmother, the first real
feminist in the Wingo family.
Pat Conroy reveals the lives of his
characters with surpassing depth and power,
capturing the vanishing beauty of the South
Carolina low-country and a lost way of life.
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THE LORDS
OF DISCIPLINE
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Publisher Houghton
Mifflin, 1980
THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE is a novel about
coming of age, brotherhood, betrayal, and a
man’s forging of his own personal code of
honor. The scene is the venerable Carolina
Military Institute in Charleston, in the
fall of 1966. The first black cadet has been
admitted to the college, and Will McLean, a
senior on the cadets’ honor court, is asked
to keep an eye on him. There is a rumor that
a secret organization, The Ten, may be
trying to run the black student off campus.
An outsider by nature, Will plays basketball
for a school that prizes military prowess
but belittles athletics. He riles his
gung-ho, conservative roommates by daring to
question the escalating Vietnam war. Off
campus, though, he is less sure of himself,
in his tender but uncertain romance with the
haunting Annie Kate Gervais, a native of the
classically beautiful Charleston — with its
Federal mansions and fragrant gardens — that
captivates and threatens the country boy in
Will.
THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE shows us cadets
desperate to prove they are men in a
regimented, cruel world – and one determined
to be a man in is own way, whose search for
the truth ultimately leads him and his
beloved friends into tragic conflict with a
corrupt system.
Right in humor and suspense, abounding in a
rare honesty and generosity of feeling, and
written with magnificent force of language,
this new novel shows Pat Conroy to be one of
the strongest fictional voices in a
generation.
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THE GREAT
SANTINI
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Publisher Houghton
Mifflin, 1976
THE GREAT SANTINI takes us into the family
life of a fighter pilot. Bull Meecham is the
epitome of the Marine officer — as tough a
disciplinarian at home as at the base.
Rebellion, or even difference of opinion, is
not tolerated. Objections are met with the
statement “The Great Santini has spoken.” As
the oldest child, Ben takes the brunt of his
father’s criticism. His attempts to stand up
for himself or his mother and sister are
contemptuously dismissed. His feelings for
his father are a mixture of hate and fear,
reluctant pride in his prowess, and
unacknowledged love.
The Marine Corps and flying are the most
important things in Bull’s life. Next come
his image as a tough guy, the Catholic
Church, his old buddies, his wife and
children. His sons are destined to become
Marine pilots, his daughters to provide
their husbands (Marine, naturally) with a
good home and more fodder for the Corps.
Ben is eighteen and a born athlete. So his
father’s fierce drive for a successful son
is concentrated on him and nothing less than
perfection is considered acceptable — a
perfection of which Bull is the sole judge.
Ben must learn that in a game, sportsmanship
should go by the board when necessary; what
matters is to win, regardless of the means.
This is the story of a boy’s determination
to be himself, whatever that may be. It is
violent, shocking, funny, moving, and
overwhelmingly real. From the early pages,
with Bull’s wife and children waiting at the
airport to welcome the Great Santini back
into their midst, to the bittersweet ending,
the reader’s interest and emotions are fixed
upon the fluctuating fortunes of the Meecham
family.
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THE WATER
IS WIDE
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Publisher Houghton
Mifflin, 1972
“Someone told me about Yamacraw, said they
needed a teacher, that the teacher who had
been there thirty-nine years was quitting,
and they couldn’t get anyone else. This
looked like the perfect opportunity for me
to get rid of my do-gooder tendencies. And
so I went to Yamacraw Island. They gave me a
boat, told me “Good Luck,” and that was all
they told me.
“The first thing I learned when I got there
was that fourteen of the seventeen kids in
grades five through eight read below the
first grade level. Five of the kids did not
know the alphabet; five of the kids also did
not know how to add one and one, two and
two, things I thought rather basic in the
education of most people. I also discovered
that most of the kids have been trained to
obey the whip and the belt and the hand.
What they feared most was physical
punishment. Everyone in my class was
interrupted by the sound of leather on flesh
from the next room. And these kids evidently
had become accustomed to corporal punishment
and they would learn only in response to
corporal punishment. The thing I thought I
had to do first was to not beat the kids but
to let them know that education was fun.”
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THE BOO
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Old New York Bookshop
Press, 1970
In 1961, Lt. Colonel Nugent Courvoisie
accepted the job as assistant commandant of
cadets at The Citadel, the military college
of South Carolina. During the next seven
years, The Boo, as the cadets called him,
was in charge of meting out punishment to
those young men accused of breaking Citadel
law. THE BOO was a harsh guardian of
justice, but he was also an extremely
compassionate and sensitive individual who
cared deeply about the young men placed
under his jurisdiction. If he was often
stern and uncompromising, he was also
concerned and understanding. He possessed a
special ability in dealing with the problem
cadet; the boy who found The Citadel too
difficult or too confining; the boy from the
broken home, or the boy forced to go to a
military college by parents who had failed
him. He empathized with cadets who were
stifled by the system and, in his own way,
tried to guide them through the obstacles
that inevitably littered the path to
graduation.
THE BOO was many things to many people.
During the years as assistant commandant, he
was part analyst, part confessor, part
detective, part father, part son of a bitch,
and all soldier.
This is the story of THE BOO and the story
of The Citadel from 1961-1968. It is the
story of young men and the man they turned
to for laughter, for help, and for
inspiration.
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