Works by
Frank Conroy
(Writer)
[January 15, 1936 - April 6, 2005]

Biography/Memoirs

• Stop-Time: A Memoir (1967) -- Nominated National Book Award
  First published in 1967, this is an autobiography that is a memoir of boyhood and adolescence. Beginning with a lesson in brutality at a progressive boarding school, the book moves to a self-help settlement in Florida, a Connecticut mental hospital (where Conroy's mother and stepfather are wardens), and to New York City (where he survives by his wits in schools, at jobs, and even more dangerously at home). Then, after his mother leaves for Europe and his stepfather installs an insane mistress in the family's apartment, Conroy runs away, embarking on new adventures.

Fiction

• Body and Soul (1998)
  In the dim light of a basement apartment, six-year-old Claude Rawlings sits at an old white piano, picking out the sounds he has heard on the radio and shutting out the reality of his lonely world.
  
  The setting is 1940s New York, a city that is "long gone, replaced by another city of the same name." Against a backdrop that pulses with sound and rhythm, Body & Soul brilliantly evokes the life of a child prodigy whose musical genius pulls him out of squalor and into the drawing rooms of the rich and a gilt-edged marriage.
  
  But the same talent that transforms him also hurtles Claude into a lonely world of obsession and relentless ambition. From Carnegie Hall to the smoky jazz clubs of London, Body & Soul burns with passion and truth--at once a riveting, compulsive read and a breathtaking glimpse into a boy's heart and an artist's soul.

Non-fiction

• Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket (Crown Journeys) (2004)
  Frank Conroy first visited Nantucket with a gang of college friends in 1955. They came on a whim, and for Conroy it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with this "small, relaxed oasis in the ocean." This book, part travel diary, part memoir, is a hauntingly evocative and personal journey through Nantucket: its sweeping dunes, rugged moors, remote beaches, secret fishing spots, and hidden forests and cranberry bogs. Admirers of Conroy’s classic and acclaimed memoir Stop-Time will again delight in what James Atlas, writing in the New York Times, called his "genius for close observation."
  
  In Time and Tide, Conroy recounts the island’s history from the glory days of the whaling boom to the present, when tourism dominates. He vividly evokes the clash of cultures between the working class and the super-rich, with the fragile ecology of the island always in the balance. But most fascinating of all, he tells his own story--of playing jazz piano in the island’s bars; of raising a barn in the early '60s with the help of a bunch of hippie carpenters; of leasing an old, failed bar with two island pals and turning it into the Roadhouse, a club "that was to be ours, the year-rounders, and to hell with the summer people." There’s a marvelous story of his first golf game, played on an ancient nine-hole course with two friends, a part-time sommelier and a builder from the South who invented the one-handed pepper mill.
  
  This is a book that revels in friendship, music, history, and the gorgeous landscape of a unique American place, and is a wonderful work by one of our greatest contemporary writers.

• Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now (2002)
  For thirty years, Frank Conroy's commentaries on life, music, and writing have appeared regularly in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, and GQ. DOGS BARK, BUT THE CARAVAN ROLLS ON collects these pieces into an autobiography in journalistic snapshots. They evoke Conroy's southern childhood, his teen years in New York as a truant hanging out at pool halls and Harlem jazz clubs, his first glimmers of the power of language and the writing life in college, his romantic life, and his experiences as a teacher and as director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Here, too, are profiles of the musicians he has come to know -- and jammed with: Keith Jarrett, Wynton Marsalis, Peter Serkin, even the Rolling Stones. New essays fill out the collection from Conroy's wry retrospective viewpoint. DOGS BARK, BUT THE CARAVAN ROLLS ON is imbued with the honesty, humor, and insight that made his memoir STOP-TIME a classic.

Short Stories

• Midair: Stories (1986)
  A long-awaited collection of stories from the author of Stop-time.

See also:

• The Iowa Award: The Best Stories, 1991-2000 (2001), Selected by Frank Conroy
  According to the New York Times Book Review, the Iowa Short Fiction Award is among the most prestigious literary prizes America offers, and the Chicago Tribune has called the honor a respected prize that annually introduces readers to a writer whose work is little known outside the circle of literary magazine and university publications. In 1991, to both celebrate the stories discovered by the Iowa Short Fiction Award and its companion, the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and to further acquaint readers with the prize-winning authors, Frank Conroy compiled The Iowa Award: The Best Stories from Twenty Years. He follows that now with The Iowa Award: The Best Stories, 1991-2000, a collection of twenty-one winning selections.
  
  Whether hurtling toward Earth in a disabled airplane, sharing silence with a prostitute, fantasizing about the Manson family, or hiding disgust for a dying friend, the characters in this new collection engage and captivate readers. The authors from 1991 winners Elizabeth Harris and Sondra Spatt Olsen to newcomers John McNally and Elizabeth Oness explore the nuances of love, lust, youth, old age, illness, nostalgia, obsession, idiosyncrasy, and surprise.
  
  Their work judged by such accomplished writers as Ethan Canin, Francine Prose, Ann Beattie, and Stuart Dybek and the selections Conroy has chosen to share exemplify remarkable writing. Moreover, each writer achieves the expectations of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, established in 1969 to provide a forum for the publication of a uniquely American literary form.

• The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (1999)
  "My instructions to them were deliberately vague--they were to write about writing, any aspect or approach that caught their fancy. Leaving it open seemed to me to heighten the chances of getting the strongest and least predictable work. And so it was. They came at it from different angles, using different techniques, and each piece is unique. Perhaps the only common tacit assumption is that writing is difficult."-- From the Introduction by Frank Conroy
  
  Since its inception in 1936, the Iowa Writers' Workshop has been perched atop the creative writing landscape, producing some of the greatest writers of the century. Though no one claims that writing can be taught--the Workshop itself professes no method--there is no disputing the success of the program and its celebrated attendees. Of the 20 Pulitzers awarded for fiction and poetry in the ‘90s, nine have gone to University of Iowa graduates.
  
  For The Eleventh Draft, present-day director Frank Conroy invited 23 former professors and students of the Iowa Writers' Workshop to pen essays on their craft. As he hints in his Introduction, he was looking for an eclecticism, and The Eleventh Draft is nothing if not diverse. Some pieces are deeply personal; others might have been scripted for the first day of class. They are sometimes prescriptive, often contradictory, but always eloquent and provocative.
  
  The Eleventh Draft is an invaluable resource for aspiring and established writers, for lovers of literature, and for anyone intrigued by the writing process or the Workshop itself. If you have doubts, open this anthology and, as Conroy advises, "Listen up."