This image is the cover for the book Member of the Wedding

Member of the Wedding

An imaginative twelve-year-old Georgia tomboy is jealous of her brother’s upcoming wedding in this classic Southern novel.

Carson McCullers’s classic The Member of the Wedding charmed generations of readers and became an award-winning play and a major motion picture. It tells the story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother’s upcoming marriage. Bolstered by lively conversations with the family maid, 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. She hopes even to go, uninvited, on the honeymoon, so deep is her desire to become part of something larger, more accepting, than herself. “A marvelous study of the agony of adolescence” (Detroit Free Press), The Member of the Wedding showcases Carson McCullers at her most sensitive, most astute, and lasting best.

Praise for The Member of the Wedding

“McCullers’s best. An unusual story of a very sensitive child . . . [that] holds you by the very brilliance of its writing.” —Atlanta Journal Constitution

“A serious attempt to recapture that elusive moment when childhood melts into adolescence . . . touching.” —Time

“Rarely has emotional turbulence been so delicately conveyed.” —New York Times

Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers (1917-1967) was the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Clock Without Hands. Born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917, she became a promising pianist and enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York when she was seventeen, but lacking money for tuition, she never attended classes. Instead she studied writing at Columbia University, which ultimately led to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the novel that made her an overnight literary sensation. On September 29, 1967, at age fifty, she died in Nyack, New York, where she is buried.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (hmhbooks.com)