The Member of the Wedding (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

McCullers, Carson

3.74

474 ratings by Goodreads

9780811200936: The Member of the Wedding (New Directions Paperbook)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811200930 ISBN 13: 9780811200936

Publisher: New Directions, 1951

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Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: At the suggestion of her friend Tennessee Williams, Southern writer Carson McCullers adapted her novella The Member of the Wedding into a touching and poignant play that was an enormous success when it opened on Broadway in 1950, and has long since become a classic of the American theater.

With compassion, veracity and wit, in The Member of the Wedding Carson McCullers depicts the intrinsically enmeshed lives of whites and blacks in the American South. Julie Harris became a star playing the awkward, twelve-year-old tomboy Frankie Adams, who falls deeply in love with her older brother and his fianc�. Exhilarated by her naive conviction that being a member of their wedding means she will become what she calls the "we of me," Frankie is devastated when she learns she is not invited on the honeymoon. Bernice Sadie Brown, who has experienced a lifetime of love and loss, is a surrogate mother for Frankie. Portrayed on stage and in the film versions by the great Ethel Waters, Bernice is an epic character, fiercely loyal, down-to-earth, and centered by deep faith.

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Review:

Twelve-year-old Frankie Adams, longing at once for escape and belonging, takes her role as "member of the wedding" to mean that when her older brother marries she will join the happy couple in their new life together. But Frankie is unlucky in love; her mother is dead, and Frankie narrowly escapes being raped by a drunken soldier during a farewell tour of the town. Worst of all, "member of the wedding" doesn't mean what she thinks. A gorgeous, brief coming-of-age novel.

From the Publisher:

When she was only twenty-three Carson McCuller's first novel The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, created a literary sensation. She is very special, once of American's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition.

"Rarely has emotional turbulence been so delicately conveyed," said The New York Times of Carson McCullers's achingly real novel about Frankie Addams, a bored twelve-year-old madly jealous of her brother's impending marriage. Frankie was afraid of the dark and envious of the older girls. But as F. Jasmine, in a pink dress, she looked sixteen. No longer a child, she accepted a date with a red-haired soldier and purchased a sophisticated gown for the wedding. F. Jasmine had plans.

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