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A New York Times best-selling author of eleven novels and memoirs, Pat Conroy is one of America’s most beloved storytellers and a writer as synonymous with the South Carolina lowcountry as pluff mud or the Palmetto tree. As Conroy’s writings have been rooted in autobiography more often than not, his readers have come to know and appreciate much about the once-secret dark familial history that has shaped Conroy’s life and work. Conversations with the Conroys opens further the discussion of the Conroy family through four revealing interviews conducted in 2014 with Pat Conroy and four of his six siblings: brothers Mike, Jim, and Tim and sister Kathy. In confessional and often comic dialogs, the Conroys openly discuss the perils of being raised by their larger-than-life parents, USMC fighter pilot Col. Don Conroy (the Great Santini) and southern belle Peggy Conroy (née Peek); the complexities of having their history of abuse made public by Pat’s books; the tragic death of their youngest brother, Tom; the chasm between them and their sister Carol Ann; and the healing, redemptive embrace they have come to find over time in one another. With good humor and often-striking candor, these interviews capture the Conroys as authentic and indeed proud South Carolinians, not always at ease with their place in literary lore, but nonetheless deeply supportive of Pat in his life and writing. Edited and introduced by the Palmetto State’s preeminent historian, Walter Edgar, Conversations with the Conroys includes the first publications of Pat Conroy’s interview with Edgar as the keynote address of the 2014 One Book, One Columbia citywide “big read\" program, the unprecedented interview with the Conroy siblings for SCETV Radio’s Walter Edgar’s Journal, the resulting live Conroy Family Roundtable held at the 2014 South Carolina Book Festival, and a recent interview in Charleston following Pat Conroy’s induction into the Citadel’s Athletics Hall of Fame. This collection is augmented with an afterword from National Book Award–winning poet Nikky Finney and nearly fifty photographs, many from the Pat Conroy Archive in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries, and published here for the first time. Through the resulting treasure trove of text and images, this volume is as much a keepsake for Conroy’s legion of devoted fans as it is a wealth of insider information to broaden the understanding of readers and researchers alike of the idiosyncratic world of Pat Conroy and his family.

Bestselling author Pat Conroy acknowledges the books that have shaped him and celebrates the profound effect reading has had on his life.

A new nonfiction collection of letters, interviews, and magazine articles spanning Conroy's long literary career, supplemented by pieces from the author's many friends.

Pat Conroy’s work as a novelist and a memoirist has indelibly shaped the image of the American South in the cultural imagination. His writing has rendered the physical landscape of the South Carolina lowcountry familiar to legions of readers, and it has staked out a more complex geography as well, one defined by domestic trauma, racial anxiety, religious uncertainty, and cultural ambivalence. In Understanding Pat Conroy, Catherine Seltzer engages in a sustained consideration of Conroy and his work. The study begins with a sketch of Conroy’s biography, a narrative that, while fascinating in its own right, is employed here to illuminate many of the motifs and characters that define his work and to locate him within southern literary tradition. The volume then moves on to explore each of Conroy’s major works, tracing the evolution of the themes within and among each of his novels, including The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music, and South of Broad, and his memoirs, among them The Water Is Wide and My Losing Season. Seltzer’s insightful close readings of Conroy’s work are supplemented by interviews and archival material, shedding new light on the often-complex dynamics between text and context in Conroy’s oeuvre. More broadly Understanding Pat Conroy also explores the ways that Conroy delights in troubling the boundaries that circumscribe the literary establishment. Seltzer links Conroy’s work to existing debates about the contemporary American canon, and, like Conroy’s work itself, Understanding Pat Conroy will be of interest to his readers, students of American literature, and new and veteran South watchers.

A memoir by the bestselling author of The Prince of Tides about his father--the inspiration for The Great Santini--and a reaffirmation that love can conquer even the meanest of men.

Thanks to his books, I realized how much literature and cuisine could weave connections between our different cultures. A few years ago, I had the immense honor of publishing two of Pat Conroy's books in their French versions. While France is also experiencing a renewed interest in local and traditional wild products, we were fascinated by recipes featuring elderberry, wild garlic, and black walnuts. While these recipes may be new to French readers, some of the ingredients are familiar.

In February 2021, eight months before the death of Aldo P. Magi, we learned of the death of Aldo's sister and long-time Thomas Wolfe Society member Anita Magi. Upon seeing a brief report about Anita Magi, the late Christopher F. Bruno misinterpreted it as an announcement of Aldo's death and immediately sent out a heartfelt message of grief to several members of the Society. (Bruno, who was just seven years old when his father died, had for many years considered Aldo Magi a father figure.) When the misunderstanding was cleared up, Chris expressed his condolences to Aldo on the loss of his sister, and he then wrote this essay, which was submitted to the Review in March 2021. Chris died unexpectedly in April 2022, one month before the Thomas Wolfe Society Conference in Asheville.