The Great Santini by Conroy, Pat (Donald Patrick "pat" Conroy) - 1976

Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company. Very Good+ in Very Good+ dust jacket. 1976. 1st Edition; 1st Printing. Hardcover. This book is in Very Good+ condition and has a Very Good+ dust jacket. There is a tiny bit of bumping to the top edge of the book's spine and a very thin strip of beginning fading. The text pages are clean and bright. There is some light, but noticable ground-in finger dirt to the edges of the text block. The dust jacket is mostly clean and bright. There is one small semi-closed tear to the top rear spine joint, and some very beginning bumping and rubbing to the spine ends and corners of the book covers. "His first book, The Boo, is a collection of anecdotes about cadet life centering on Lt. Colonel Thomas Nugent Courvousie, who had served as Assistant Commandant of Cadets at The Citadel from 1961 to 1968; [6] Courvoisie was the inspiration for the fictional character Colonel Thomas Berrineau, a. K. A. "The Bear", in The Lords Of Discipline. Conroy began the book in 1968, after learning that Lt. Colonel Courvoisie had been removed from his position as assistant commandant and given a job in the warehouse; he paid to self-publish the book, borrowing the money from a bank. After graduating from The Citadel, Conroy taught English in Beaufort, South Carolina; while there he met and married Barbara Jones, a young widow of the Vietnam War who was pregnant with her second child. He then accepted a job teaching children in a one-room schoolhouse on remote Daufuskie Island, South Carolina. " (from Wikipedia) .