The Water Is Wide was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1972 — Conroy’s first book, written at twenty-six, a memoir of his year teaching on Daufuskie Island, a sea island off the coast of South Carolina accessible only by boat, where the Black population (descendants of enslaved people) lived in conditions little changed since Reconstruction.
Conroy arrived in 1969 to find students who could not read, who had never seen a map of the United States, who did not know what country they lived in. The school had been abandoned by every competent teacher; the superintendent and school board — white, mainland, indifferent — allocated minimal resources and expected nothing from Black children on an island nobody cared about.
Conroy’s response was radical for rural South Carolina in 1969: he threw away the textbooks (which were outdated hand-me-downs from white schools), played classical music and Beethoven in class, took students on field trips to the mainland (many had never crossed the water), brought in guest speakers, taught through enthusiasm rather than discipline, and treated his students as human beings capable of curiosity and growth.
The school board fired him. The charge was insubordination — he had taken students on unauthorized field trips and refused to use the approved curriculum. The real reason was that he had embarrassed them: his success with students they had written off as ineducable exposed their decades of neglect. Conroy fought the dismissal publicly, lost, and turned the experience into this book.
The memoir was adapted as the 1974 film Conrack (starring Jon Voight), which introduced Conroy to a national audience and established the template for the “inspirational teacher” genre. But Conroy’s book is sharper and angrier than the film: it indicts not just individual racists but the system that allowed an entire community to be abandoned.
Collecting The Water Is Wide
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1972): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $75–$200
- Signed first edition: $150–$400
- Without jacket: $15–$30
Conroy’s first book and increasingly scarce in fine condition. The small initial print run (it was a first book by an unknown) makes jacket copies genuinely uncommon.