Pinckney, Josephine Lyons Scott | South Carolina Public Radio

“P” is for Pinckney, Josephine Lyons Scott [1895-1957]. Poet, novelist, civic leader. Pinckney played a key role in the literary revival that swept through the South after World War I. She was one of the founding members of the Poetry Society of South Carolina in 1920. During the following decade, she emerged as a poet of national reputation when her work, often evocative eulogies to a vanishing way of Southern life, appeared in influential journals such as the Saturday Review of Literature and Poetry. Pinckney participated in other aspects of the Charleston Renaissance through her dedicated involvement in such local cultural institutions as the Carolina Art Association, Charleston Museum, and the Dock Street Theatre. Josephine Lyons Scott Pinckney’s novel, Three O’clock Dinner, appeared in 1945 and made her one of America’s best-known women fiction-writers.