Book excerpt: This book chronicles the first 100 years of the history of the oldest state poetry society in America, the Poetry Society of South Carolina, founded in Charleston in 1920 by DuBose Heyward, John Bennett, Josephine Pinckney, Hervey Allen, and Laura Bragg. It covers every one of the 101 seasons of the PSSC from the Jazz Age to the COVID era, where everyone from Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Ogden Nash, Billy Collins, Sherwood Anderson, Jericho Brown, Thornton Wilder, Robert Pinsky, and hundreds of others appeared before the membership. This is an insider's view, with insights into the inner workings and disfunctions of the organization and its slow progress from a Whites-only organization of the segregated South founded in the aftermath of World War I and the Spanish Flu Pandemic, through the Roaring Twenties, into the darkness of the Great Depression, World War II, a resurgence during the Atomic Age, the turbulent Sixties, the decline of Charleston, its rebound into a tourist mecca, and into the present day. Written as a page-turner, not an encyclopedia, The History of the Poetry Society of South Carolina is a fascinating read from beginning to end. It's loaded with useless trivia, salacious gossip, morbidity, humor, scandal, heartbreak, intrigue, embezzlement, drama, backstabbing, and irony.