Conroy evened the score by exposing the racism and appalling conditions his students endured with the publication of The Water is Wide in 1972. After a year, Conroy was fired for his unconventional teaching practices - such as his refusal to allow corporal punishment of his students - and for his personal differences with the school's administration. He then accepted a job teaching underprivileged children in a one-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island off the South Carolina shore. While still a student, he wrote and then published his first book, The Boo, a tribute to a beloved teacher.Īfter graduation, Conroy taught English in Beaufort, where he met and married a young woman with two children, a widow of the Vietnam War. Since his family had to move many times to different military bases around the South, Conroy changed schools frequently, finally attending the Citadel Military Academy in Charleston, South Carolina, upon his father's insistence. His father was a violent and abusive man, a man whose biggest mistake, Conroy once said, was allowing a novelist to grow up in his home. Pat Conroy was born on October 26, 1945, in Atlanta, Georgia, to a young career military officer from Chicago and a Southern beauty from Alabama, whom Pat often credits for his love of language.
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