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The Water Is Wide by Pat Conroy7/5/2023 ![]() ![]() Whatever he expected, what Conroy found on Yamacraw was far worse. The Peace Corps did not respond, so he impulsively decided to go after an unusual job he had heard about - teaching virtually illiterate children in an old-fashioned school house on Yamacraw Island, reached only by boat, a sad but lushly beautiful place the 20th century had almost completely bypassed. The time was the late 1960s, and his idealism and his frustration with the complacent world to which he had returned soon inspired him to apply to the Peace Corps. After graduating from The Citadel, Conroy returned to Beaufort, S.C., to teach in the same high school he attended a few years earlier. In his later novels, Conroy has used details from his own life and experience, though The Water Is Wide is vibrantly told in the first person by Conroy himself. The New York Times called The Water Is Wide "a hell of a good story," and that observation points to one of Conroy's supreme gifts as a writer of fiction - the ability to craft an irresistible narrative. Readers know Pat Conroy as a novelist of great reputation and success, but his first notable achievement as a writer was an autobiographical book called The Water Is Wide, published in 1972 - the story of a year in his life as a teacher of poor African-American children on a coastal island in South Carolina. ![]()
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