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

Carson McCullers

Jan 2017 · Library of America

About this ebook

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.

About the author

Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917. At the age of nineteen she published her first short story, "Wunderkind," in Story magazine, and soon was contributing fiction to The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, and Mademoiselle. She won early critical and commercial success with her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), published when she was only twenty-three. Over the next quarter-century she published four more novels and a collection of short stories, and found Broadway success with her play The Member of the Wedding (produced in 1950). After a series of increasingly debilitating strokes, she died in Nyack, N.Y., in 1967, at the age of fifty.