Josephine Pinckney (1895--1957) was an award-winning,
best-selling author whose work critics frequently compared to that
of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and Isak Dinesen. Her flair for
storytelling and trenchant social commentary found expression in
poetry, five novels -- Three O'Clock Dinner was the most successful
-- stories, essays, and reviews. Pinckney belonged to a
distinguished South Carolina family and often used Charleston as
her setting, writing in the tradition of Ellen Glasgow by blending
social realism with irony, tragedy, and humor in chronicling the
foibles of the South's declining upper class. Barbara L. Bellows
has produced the first biography of this very private woman and
emotionally complex writer, whose life story is also the history of
a place and time -- Charleston in the first half of the twentieth
century.
In A Talent for Living, Pinckney's life unfolds like a novel as
she struggles to escape aristocratic codes and the ensnaring bonds
of southern ladyhood and to embrace modern freedoms. In 1920, with
DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen, she founded the Poetry Society of
South Carolina, which helped spark the southern literary
renaissance. Her home became a center of intellectual activity with
visitors such as the poet Amy Lowell, the charismatic presidential
candidate Wendell Willkie, and the founding editor of theSaturday
Review of Literature Henry Seidel Canby. Sophisticated and
cosmopolitan, she absorbed popular contemporary influences,
particularly that of Freudian psychology, even as she retained an
almost Gothic imagination shaped in her youth by the haunting,
tragic beauty of the Low Country and its mystical Gullah
culture.
A skilled stylist, Pinckney excelled in creating memorable
characters, but she never scripted an individual as engaging or
intriguing as herself. Bellows offers a fascinating, exhaustively
researched portrait of this onetime cultural icon and her
well-concealed personal life.
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