Beach Music
by Pat Conroy

List Price: $7.99
Pages: 800
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0553574574
Publisher: Bantam Books

The first of seven children, Pat Conroy was born in 1945 in Atlanta, Georgia, to a career military officer and a Southern beauty. The family moved many times, necessitating frequent school changes as well. While still a student at the Citadel Military Academy in Charleston, South Carolina, he wrote and published his first book, The Boo.

After graduation, Conroy taught English in Beaufort, where he met and married a widow of the Vietnam War with two children. Accepting a job teaching underprivileged children in a one-room schoolhouse on remote Daufuskie Island, he was fired after a year for his unconventional teaching practices. With the publication of The Water Is Wide in 1972, he evened the score by exposing the racism and appalling conditions that his students endured. The book won a humanitarian award from the National Education Association and was made into the film Conrack.

Following the birth of a daughter, the Conroys moved to Atlanta, where he wrote his first novel, The Great Santini, published in 1976. This autobiographical work, exploring the conflicts of his childhood, was also made into a film. The ensuing crisis caused by the book's publication led not only to his own divorce, but to that of his parents as well. His mother sent a copy of the book to the judge in her divorce trial as a form of "evidence" against his father.

The Lords of Discipline was published in 1980. The novel, another that was made into a film, exposed the Citadel's harsh military discipline, racism, and sexism.

Conroy remarried and moved to Rome, where he began The Prince of Tides. Published in 1986 to reviews that immediately acknowledged him as a master storyteller, as well as a poetic and gifted prose stylist, it quickly became his most successful book to date. With over five million copies in print--along with yet another highly successful film version--this novel has earned him an international reputation. Indeed, it is one of the most beloved novels of modern time.

Beach Music is Conroy's sixth book.

At present, he divides his time between San Francisco and South Carolina.

top of the page