With “The Prince of Tides,” Mr. Conroy hit the jackpot. His sprawling story of Tom Wingo, an unemployed high school teacher who confronts his past when he travels to New York to help his suicidal sister, sold more than 350,000 copies in hardcover and spent nearly a year on the best-seller lists. After Barbra Streisand directed and played a starring role in the film version, with Nick Nolte as the novel’s hero, Mr. Conroy moved to the front ranks of popular American writers.

Image Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand in the 1991 film “The Prince of Tides,” which was directed by Ms. Streisand. Mr. Conroy wrote the novel on which the film was based. Credit... Columbia Pictures

Some critics found him long-winded and purplish. “Inflation is the order of the day,” Richard Eder wrote of “The Prince of Tides” in The Los Angeles Times. “The characters do too much, feel too much, suffer too much, eat too much, signify too much and above all talk too much.”

Mr. Conroy’s legion of admirers, however, hung on his every word, entranced by the naked emotionalism of his male characters, the Lowcountry atmosphere and the page-turning Southern yarns.

“If a reader has experienced a Conroy novel before, he knows the book will be flawed, he knows the book is 500-plus pages, and he knows the characters are, in many ways, the same ones he knew in the last Conroy novel,” reads the entry on the writer in the reference work Contemporary Novelists. “But in many ways, it’s like returning to old friends and familiar places, and the lyricism of the prose is more than most readers can resist.”

Donald Patrick Conroy was born on Oct. 26, 1945, in Atlanta. Because of his father’s career, the family moved constantly, and Pat attended 11 schools in 12 years before an assignment to the Marine Corps Air Station in Beaufort brought stability.

Mr. Conroy embraced his new hometown with the grateful passion of a refugee. At Beaufort High School he earned a starting spot as point guard on the basketball team, while flourishing under the guidance of an English teacher who introduced him to the work of Thomas Wolfe and encouraged him to write.

Pressured by his father, Mr. Conroy accepted a scholarship to the Citadel, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1967 and gathered the material for three books. The first was a collection of reminiscences about the school’s assistant commander in charge of discipline, a colorful figure known as The Boo.