Pat Conroy's Beaufort

Among all the writers who have shaped how the American South understands itself, Pat Conroy stands apart for his connection to one particular place. Beaufort, South Carolina, was the town that finally felt like home to a man who had spent his childhood moving from base to base as the son of a Marine fighter pilot. His family settled in Beaufort in the early nineteen sixties, and Conroy finished high school here.

He came back after graduating from The Citadel. He came back again after everything else. His most celebrated novel, The Great Santini, published in nineteen seventy six, tells the story of the Meecham family in a fictional South Carolina marine town closely modeled on Beaufort.

The father in the novel is a fighter pilot who terrorizes his family with the same discipline he applies to combat. The book drew heavily on Conroy's own experience as the son of Colonel Donald Conroy, and it cost him years of estrangement from his father before the older man eventually accepted the book's essential truth. Conroy's other major works, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, and Beach Music, all return to the same landscape of tidal creeks, Spanish moss, Sea Island light, and the particular cruelty and tenderness of Southern family life.

He wrote about Beaufort the way Faulkner wrote about Mississippi, as a place that was everywhere in everything he put on a page. He died in March of twenty sixteen in Beaufort. The Pat Conroy Literary Center in Beaufort keeps his work alive in the town that made it possible.