A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary TraditionJosephine 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. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
The Last Aristocrat | 12 |
The Education of a Young Poet | 23 |
My Heart Is Still My Own | 38 |
Inventing a Southern Literature | 57 |
A Grave for Love | 77 |
SeaDrinking Cities | 91 |
Thirtysix Chalmers Street | 111 |
Farewell to First Love | 153 |
Willkie and War | 164 |
American Fantasy | 177 |
Great Mischief | 194 |
Death My Son and Foe | 212 |
Notes | 231 |
Bibliography | 267 |
281 | |