Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure.

In 2009 Conroy publiPat Conroyd South of Broad which again uses the familiar backdrop of Charleston following the suicide of newspaperman Leo King's brother and alternates narratives of a diverse group of friends between 1969 and 1989. " They divorced on 26 October 1995. The book won Conroy a humanitarian award from the National Education Association and was made into a feature film Conrack starring Jon Voight in 1974.

Two of his novels The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini were made into Oscar-nominated films. Pat Conroy (born October 26 1945) is a New York Times bestselling author who has written several acclaimed novels and memoirs.