The Member of the Wedding: A Play : A Library of America EBook Classic

Here is the story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother's wedding. Bolstered by lively conversations with her house servant, Berenice, and her six-year-old male cousin—not to mention her own unbridled imagination—Frankie takes on an overly active role in the wedding, hoping even to go, uninvited, on the honeymoon, so deep is her desire to be the member of something larger, more accepting than herself.The novel that became an award-winning play and a major motion picture and that has charmed generations of readers, Carson McCullers's classic The Member of the Wedding is now available in small-format trade paperback for the first time. Celebrated worldwide for her masterly novels, Carson McCullers was equally accomplished, and equally moving, when writing in other forms. The play The Member of the Wedding (1950), adapted from her 1946 novel at the urging of her close friend Tennessee Williams is, like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town , a great American poem for the stage. At its center is tomboy Frankie Addams, a motherless adolescent neglected by her father and utterly bored with life in small-town Georgia until romantic longing is ignited by her older brother’s wedding. A hit on Broadway, running for more than five hundred performances, it won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award and soon inspired a film.