Jayme Deerwester

USA TODAY

South Carolina lost one of it greatest storytellers Friday with the death of author Pat Conroy, who succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 70.

He turned his difficult youth, family trauma and his home state's civil rights legacy into compelling best-selling novels like The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, The Lords of Discipline and Beach Music. "I always steal the stories of my friends and family," he told USA TODAY in 2013. "Around me, no one is safe."

Conroy, who had suffered diabetes, high blood pressure and liver failure in recent years, went public with his pancreatic cancer diagnosis on Facebook about a month before he died. Even his cancer announcement read like one of his books. "Hey, out there," he wrote. "I celebrated my 70th birthday in October and realized that I’ve spent my whole writing life trying to find out who I am and I don’t believe I’ve even come close."

His family and friends echoed that tone when they announced his passing Saturday morning. "We wish he could tell you once again 'Hey out there' but we are the family, the friends, the readers and we are filled with grief and sadness. Pat Conroy left this world Friday, March 4, 2016 at 7:42 p.m., surrounded by his family and friends in his Beaufort home overlooking the marshes he so loved. There are rare people whose very existence make life bearable for the rest of us for reasons of grace, wisdom and understanding. Pat was such a men. To say he will be missed is the grandest of understatements."

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

Funeral arrangements are still being made; no details have been released.

South Carolina governor Nikki Haley paid tribute to Conroy on Twitter: "We can find comfort knowing his words and love for S.C. will live on."

He was born Donald Patrick Conroy on Oct. 26, 1945. A pack of military brats, the Conroy children attended 11 schools in 12 years before the family eventually settled in Beaufort, about an hour from Charleston. He read obsessively as a child and called fellow Southerner Thomas Wolfe his inspiration to become a writer.

“Thomas Wolfe was the first writer I felt was writing for me,” Conroy said. “He was articulating a vision of the world that seemed ready for me.”

Several of his works, including his self-published debut The Boo, 1976's The Great Santini and 1980's The Lords of Discipline, drew on his experiences with the military, both as the son of a decorated but abusive Marine fighter pilot and war hero, as well as his years as a cadet at the Citadel in Charleston during the mid-1960s.

Both Santini and Lords of Discipline initially caused rifts with Conroy's family and his fellow Citadel classmates, but eventually, they helped bring about reconciliation as well.

"(Santini) brought my father back to me," he told Gannett News Service in 2005. "Because Dad hated when I wrote about him in the book, but he loved the movie star who played him. My father thinks he's personally responsible for Robert Duvall's career. In all seriousness, he says, `Son, Duvall was a B actor before. It was the first role he had with real meat in it... Duvall's career took off after he played me, son."'

The author would reflect at length on his relationship with his father in the 2013 memoir The Death of Santini. "My dad, always in denial, treated it all as fiction, like I had made it all up, not toned it down. To prove that, he reinvented himself. After my mother divorced him (in 1975), he had the best second act I ever saw. He became the best uncle, the best brother, the best grandfather, the best friend."

“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.”

Conroy even jokingly offered the film rights for Death of Santini to Duvall and his co-stars free of charge, if they agreed to reprise their roles about "this ridiculous family I was born into."

After the 1980 publication of Lords of Discipline in which alumni and cadets plot to drive out the school's first black student and anyone who helps him, Conroy became ostracized by the Citadel community. Camera crews were not allowed on campus to shoot the 1983 movie version and Conroy was only full welcomed back in 2000 when he was awarded an honorary degree and invited to deliver the commencement speech the following year. During a 2002 homecoming visit, fans lined up for signed copies of My Losing Season, about his final year on the Citadel's basketball team.

Following his graduation in 1967, Conroy became a teacher and anti-war activist while his Citadel classmates went off to fight in Vietnam. But unlike many other draft-dodgers and protestors of his generation, he had skin in the game. “When I talk to Ivy Leaguers or war resisters of that era," he wrote, I always tell them that Vietnam was not theoretical to me, but deeply and agonizingly painful. Eight of my Citadel classmates died in that war."

Those feeling returned when he went to Charleston to watch a Citadel parade shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "Suddenly that parade had extraordinary new meaning and new passion behind it. I knew many of those young men and women would go from that parade to that graduation to that diploma to the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan."

With My Losing Season, he put those feelings down on paper, "I should have protested the war after my return from Vietnam ... I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones, but lacked the courage to act on: America is a good enough country to die for even when she is wrong."

For a year, he taught poor children on isolated Daufuskie Island, not far from the resort of Hilton Head. The experience was the basis for his 1972 book, The Water Is Wide, which brought him a National Endowment for the Arts award and was made into the movie Conrack.

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.

Tides was made into a hit 1991 film starring Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand, who also produced and directed it. Conroy worked on the screenplay and shared an Oscar nomination, one of seven Oscar nominations it earned, including best picture.

Conroy’s much-anticipated Beach Music, published in 1995, was a best seller that took nine years to complete. Conroy had been working on The Prince of Tides screenplay, but he also endured a divorce, depression, back surgery and the suicide of his youngest brother.

Conroy was married three times and had four daughters and five stepchildren. Although he lived around the world, he always considered South Carolina his home and lived since the late 1990s on Fripp Island, a gated community near Beaufort.

Why did he settle in a town he once hated? "When we came into Beaufort ... I was so miserable," he recalled to GNS. "I told my mother, `Nobody in my last school knew I came into that school and nobody knows I'm leaving. This is my third high school, mom. This is our sixth move in a row. I'm 15 years old, I don't know anybody.' So my mother said `You know, son, you gotta make this town Beaufort your own. I'd try to dig in and make some roots.'

He did her one better. "Well, I took this thing of my mother's so seriously that two guidebooks to Beaufort were published last year. In both of them, I'm listed as a native. This is how deeply I needed someplace to call my own."

His other books included South of Broad, set in Charleston’s historic district, and My Reading Life, a collection of essays that chronicled his lifelong passion for literature. Broad contained a first of sorts for Conroy: a loving and lovable father. "I always needed one," Conroy told GNS in 2009, "so I created one": the narrator's father, a gifted, self-effacing science teacher who "treated the stars as though they were love songs written to him by God."

He admitted that he could be prone to "overwriting in a "baroque style." As he explained in that 2009 interview, "When I write action, it's short and punchy. But when I pontificate, I revert to a hydrogen-filled dirigible - although people seem to like it. If that's overwriting, blame my mother, who was language-struck, or my early fixation on Thomas Wolfe," another lyrical Southerner.

"I don't think I can help having chosen this life," he explained in a 2005 Gannett interview. "It is so odd to me. When I thought about becoming a writer, I didn't know if I could, because I didn't know any writers. I knew pilots. I knew Marines ... It has surprised me that it worked."

Contributing: The Associated Press, Bob Minzesheimer, Gannett News Service