Introduction: One of the writers I’ll never outgrow is Pat Conroy.

When I was a high school kid and being forced to read Goeorge Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Hardy, Mary Shelley, and Emily Bronte, I read them all, but what I was really enjoying was the literary world of Pat Conroy. He wrote about landscapes I loved; he wrote about insecure and overbearing fathers who did not know how to show love to their sons; he wrote of military life and why young men are sometimes drawn to it, etc. I was hooked on Conroy the way Conroy was hooked on language.

I’m reading through A Lowcountry Heart for the second time currently. It’s typical Conroy. He writes of the marsh–of Charleston, Savannah, and Beaufort. He writes of food and accents and of racial tensions. He writes of his years at the Citadel, and of men and women who shaped him for good and ill.

Homage: I don’t know how the literary world will view Conroy’s literary oeuvre over time. But for readability–for the sheer joy of reading a great storyteller–and to walk in the shoes of a man who lived deeply, it is hard to beat Pat Conroy.