No one who has read Pat Conroy's novels of family wounds and healing can fail to be moved by their emotional appeal. But Conroy is also a major contemporary American novelist who follows in the tradition of Southern fiction established by William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. This companion is the first book-length study of his work. It explores the recurring motifs in his fiction and his special writing talents as a prose stylist of uncommon distinction. A separate chapter for The Boo and The Water is Wide and each novel-- The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, and his most recent, Beach Music--provides a detailed analysis of the books and the common threads that unite all the novels. A biographical chapter draws connections between Conroy's life and the autobiographical nature of his fiction. A chapter on genre traces Conroy's roots in southern fiction and shows how all the novels fall into the rite-of-passage genre. Each novel is analyzed for plot structure, c