Pat Conroy was born on October 26, 1945, in Atlanta, Georgia, to a Southern beauty from Alabama, whom the author often credits for his love of language, and a career military officer from Chicago, whose job required his family to move many times to different Southern military bases. The first of seven children, he changed schools 11 times in 12 years, and finally attended the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was captain and most valuable player of the Varsity basketball team. While still a student, he wrote and then published his first book, The Boo, a tribute to a beloved teacher.

     After graduation, Conroy taught English in Beaufort, South Carolina where he met and married a young woman with two children, a widow of the Vietnam War. He then accepted a job teaching underprivileged children in a one-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island, a remote island off the South Carolina shore. After a year, Pat was fired for his unconventional teaching practices--such as his unwillingness to allow corporal punishment of his students--and for his general lack of respect for the school's administration. Conroy evened the score when he exposed the racism and appalling conditions his students endured with publication of The Water is Wide in 1972. The book won Conroy a humanitarian award from the National Education Association and was made into the feature film Conrack, starring Jon Voight.

     Following the birth of a daughter, the Conroys moved to Atlanta, where Pat wrote his first novel, The Great Santini, published in 1976. This autobiographical work, later made into a powerful film starring Robert Duvall, explored the conflicts of his childhood, particularly his confusion over his love and loyalty to an abusive and often dangerous father.

     The publication of a book that so painfully exposed his family's secret brought Conroy to a period of tremendous personal desolation. This crisis resulted in not only his own divorce but the divorce of his parents; his mother presented a copy of The Great Santini as to the judge as "evidence" in divorce proceedings against his father.

     The Citadel became the subject of his next novel, The Lords of Discipline, published in 1980. The novel exposed the school's harsh military discipline, racism, and sexism. This book, too, was made into a film.

     Pat remarried and moved from Atlanta to Rome where he began The Prince of Tides, which, when published in 1986, became his most successful book. Reviewers immediately acknowledged Conroy as a master storyteller and a poetic and gifted prose stylist. This novel has become one of the most beloved novels of modern time. With over five million copies in print, it has earned Conroy an international reputation. The Prince of Tides was made into a highly successful feature film directed by Barbra Streisand, who also starred in the film opposite Nick Nolte, whose brilliant performance won him an Oscar nomination.

     Beach Music, Conroy's sixth book and his first novel since The Prince of Tides, tells the story of Jack McCall, an American who moves to Rome to escape the trauma and painful memory of his young wife's suicidal leap off a bridge in South Carolina. The story takes place in South Carolina and Rome, then reaches back in time to the Vietnam War and the horrors of the Holocaust.

     Pat Conroy divides his time between San Francisco and South Carolina.