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:
“When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.”
—Lewis Thomas (b. 1913)