Description:
New York Times best-selling writer Pat Conroy (1945-2016) inspired a worldwide legion of devoted fans numbering in the millions, but none are more loyal to him and more committed to sustaining his literary legacy than the many writers he nurtured over the course of his fifty-year writing life. In sharing their stories of Conroy, his fellow writers honor his memory and advance our shared understanding of his lasting impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary life in and well beyond the American South.
Conroy's was a messy fellowship of people from all walks of life. His relationships were complicated, and people and places he thought he'd left behind often circled back to him at crucial moments. The pantheon of contributors includes Pulitzer Prize winners Rick Bragg and Kathleen Parker; Grammy winners Barbra Streisand and Janis Ian; Lillian Smith Award winners Anthony Grooms and Mary Hood; National Book Award winner Nikky Finney; James Beard Foundation Award winners Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart; a corps of New York Times best-selling authors, including Ron Rash, Sandra Brown, and Mary Alice Monroe; Conroy biographers Katherine Clark and Catherine Seltzer; longtime Conroy friends Bernie Schein, Cliff Graubart, John Warley, and Walter Edgar; Pat's students Sallie Ann Robinson and Valerie Sayers; members of the Conroy family; and many more. Each author in this collection shares a slightly different view of Conroy. Through their voices, a vibrant, multifaceted portrait of him comes to life and sheds new light on the writer and the man. Loosely following Conroy's own chronology, the essays in Our Prince of Scribes wind through his river of a story, stopping at important ports of call. Cities he called home and longed to visit, along with each book he birthed, become characters that are as equally important as the people he touched and loved along the way.Brief description: NATHALIE DUPREE (1939-2025) was a recipient of the Cordon Bleu Advanced Certificate. She hosted more than three hundred top-rated television cooking shows on PBS, the Learning Channel, Star TV, and the Food Network. She founded Rich's Cooking School in 1972 and taught more than ten thousand students around the world. She was the author of eleven cookbooks, including New Southern Cooking (Georgia), Nathalie Dupree's Southern Memories (Georgia, and Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking. She lived in Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband, Jack Bass.
Review Quotes: Pat Conroy was a force for good in our world. With courage and grace, he brought the gifts of the devastating beauty of his writing and his transcendent vision of the human heart to the lives of the readers he touched and the writers he inspired.--Barbra Streisand "from the foreword to Our Prince of Scribes"