"You are an authentic primitive," Mingus told him, "but you swing."
"I'd like to think," Mr. Conroy wrote, "I'm a better writer than piano player."
"I could not resist the clarity of the world in books," Frank Conroy wrote, "the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality."
(AP)
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In Iowa, he was host of a jazz program on public radio.
In the 1970s and '80s, Mr. Conroy taught at American University, George Mason University, Brandeis University and MIT. From 1982 to 1987, he was director of the literature program for the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1987, Mr. Conroy became director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He personally read each of the 750 applications for 25 openings in the prose section. He could be a blunt, forceful teacher, unsparing in his criticism of students' work. Yet he also was loved by his students, who included Jayne Ann Phillips, Chris Offutt, ZZ Packer and Anthony Swofford.
"I have no theoretical ax to grind," he said in an interview last year with the New York Times. "I'm most interested in writing itself, for itself, rather than how it fits into a theory of literature."
His marriage to Patty Ferguson ended in divorce.
Survivors include his second wife, Maggie Lee Conroy, and two sons from his first marriage and a son from his second marriage.
