Pat Conroy, author of 'Prince of Tides,' dies at 70

Pat Conroy, the beloved author of The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides and other best-sellers who drew upon his bruising childhood and the vistas of South Carolina and became one of the country's most compelling and popular storytellers, died Friday evening. He was 70.

Conroy, who announced last month that he had pancreatic cancer, died at home among family and loved ones in Beaufort, South Carolina, according to his publisher. The heavy-set author had battled other health problems in recent years, including diabetes, high blood pressure and a failing liver.

The water is wide and he has now passed over, his wife, novelist Cassandra Conroy, said in a statement from publisher Doubleday.

Funeral arrangements were still being made.

Few contemporary authors seemed more knowable to their readers over than Conroy. An openly personal writer, he candidly and expansively shared details of growing up as a military brat and his anguished relationship with his abusive father, Marine aviator and military hero Donald Conroy. He also wrote of his time in military school and his struggles with his health and depression.

The reason I write is to explain my life to myself, Conroy said in a 1986 interview. I've also discovered that when I do, I'm explaining other people's lives to them.

His books sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, but for much of his youth he crouched in the shadow of Donald Conroy, who thundered out of the sky in black-winged fighter planes, every inch of him a god of war, as Pat Conroy would remember. The author was the eldest of seven children in a family constantly moving from base to base, a life readers and moviegoers would learn well from The Great Santini as a novel and film, which starred Robert Duvall as the relentless and violent patriarch.

The 1976 novel initially enraged Conroy's family, but the movie three years later made such an impression on his father that he claimed credit for boosting Duvall's career (The actor had already appeared in two Godfather films), saying, The poor guy got a role with some meat on it.

But the book also helped achieve peace between father and son.

I grew up hating my father, Conroy said after his father died in 1998. It was the great surprise of my life, after the book came out, what an extraordinary man had raised me. The author would reflect at length on his relationship with his father in the 2013 memoir The Death of Santini.

The Prince of Tides, published in 1986, secured Conroy a wide audience, selling more than 5 million copies despite uneven reviews for its story of a former football player from South Carolina with a traumatic past and the New York psychiatrist who attempts to help him.

Inflation is the order of the day. The characters do too much, feel too much, suffer too much, eat too much, signify too much and, above all, talk too much, said The Los Angeles Times Book Review.

But Conroy focused on the advice he once got from the finest writer I ever encountered, novelist James Dickey, who taught him at the University of South Carolina.

He told me to write everything I did with all the passion and all the power you could muster, Conroy recalled. Don't worry about how long it takes or how long it is when you're done. You know, he was right.