The Member of the Wedding is a 1946 novel by Southern writer Carson McCullers. It took McCullers five years to complete (though she interrupted the work for a few months to write the short novel The Ballad of the Sad Cafe).
In a letter to her husband Reeves McCullers, she explained that the novel was "one of those works that the least slip can ruin. It must be beautifully done. For like a poem there is not much excuse for it otherwise."
She originally planned to write a story about a girl who is in love with her piano teacher, but she had what she called "a divine spark: "Suddenly I said: Frankie is in love with her brother and the bride... The illumination focused the whole book."
Read more about The Member Of The Wedding: Plot, Critical Interpretations, Adaptations, References in Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word member:
“There are several natural phenomena which I shall have to have explained to me before I can keep on going as a resident member of the human race. One is the metamorphosis which hats and suits undergo exactly one week after their purchase, whereby they are changed from smart, intensely becoming articles of apparel into something children use when they want to “dress up like daddy.””
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)