Its beauty was a shining thing and a living thing that would never leave me as long as I was true to that starry, everlasting river-fed country of my art. “When I began to write my books, I thought I carried the comeliness of the Lowcountry deep inside me. It was during this enchanting, unforgettable year that I developed a Lowcountry heart. It was the year I learned to water-ski in the Broad River, that I attended my first oyster roast at a house on Port Royal Sound, and that a Marine colonel took me on a fishing trip to an uninhabited sea island called Fripp. When our child-laden car entered Beaufort County as we crossed over the pristine waters of the Combahee River, I caught my first unforgettable view of the Great Salt Marsh. “In 1961, the Marine Corps sent my father orders that would send the Conroy family rocketing toward a destiny we were never supposed to have. It opens with a forward from his wife, writer Cassandra King, and concludes with touching remembrances from some special friends.Ī moving and proper tribute to a true Southern icon.įor those true fans who are not ready to let Conroy go, this book is for you: South of Broad is Pat Conroy at his finest a long-awaited work from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds.“A Low Country Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life,” is a collection of blog articles, speeches, letters, interviews and eulogies produced during the final years of his career. But the final test of friendship that brings them to San Francisco is something no one is prepared for. The ties among them endure for years, surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, and Charleston's dark legacy of racism and class divisions. Eventually, he finds his answer when he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that includes friends Sheba and Trevor Poe, glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison-escapee father hardscrabble mountain runaways Niles and Starla Whitehead socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge X and an ever-widening circle whose liaisons will ripple across two decades-from 1960s counterculture through the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of thirteen, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death, and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to sustain him. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints.

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