In this book Pat Conroy tells of the books which have influenced his life and led to his becoming a writer. He was set on this path by his mother who offered the inspiration and solace of great literature to counteract the “firestorm” of life when his father, a marine fighter pilot, was at home. Read his novel, “ The Great Santini.”
In 1969 Conroy got a job teaching grades five through eleven on Daufuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina. Five of his students didn’t know the alphabet. “All read below the first-grade level, and none knew the Atlantic Ocean washed up on the shore of their island,” he says. Conroy organized field trips for them, even one to Washington, and invited speakers in to meet his students; as a result he was not re-hired.
Like Conroy, I fell in love with Thomas Wolfe when I was in my twenties, and to quote Wolfe, “knew that I would never die.” I read every word Wolfe wrote or was written about him. My heart broke when he died, but unlike Conroy my tastes turned to less flowery writing. The influence of Wolfe’s torrents still add color to Conroy’s work.
“It is a well known fact,” writes Conroy, “that I will carefully select four silvery, difficult-to-digest adjectives when one lean Anglo-Saxon adjective will suffice.”
I thank Pat Conroy for the many interesting essays in “My Reading Life,” and for his “Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe.”
[Published 2010]
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