![]() “The Lords of Discipline,” which drew heavily on Mr. ![]() Conroy’s father, and Blythe Danner as his wife. The miseries of his childhood and youth, and his troubled relationship with his father, supplied the material for “The Great Santini,” a modest commercial success that gained wider fame when it was made into a film in 1979 with Robert Duvall playing Lt. That’s the taste of my childhood.’ I would say, ‘Breathe deeply,’ and you would breathe and remember that smell for the rest of your life, the bold, fecund aroma of the tidal marsh, exquisite and sensual, the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk, semen and spilled wine, all perfumed with seawater.” Scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open you an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, ‘There. “To describe our growing up in the Lowcountry of South Carolina,” his alter-ego narrator wrote in “The Prince of Tides,” “I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation. ![]() ![]() Conroy mined the people, the places and the trauma of his childhood and young manhood for his thinly fictionalized novels and a series of memoirs that captivated readers with their openly emotional tone, lurid family stories and lush prose that often reached its most affecting, lyrical pitch when evoking the wetlands around Beaufort, S.C. ![]()
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