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

While I loved the title THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, I never felt that was McCuller's best. I do think this is a better novel about a young girl growing up in the South than TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and is a small masterpiece.

I am constantly amazed at the speed with which I receive my purchases. I know they will be as stated so I am not surprised by the quality of the merchandise, but I am always pleased at the speed of delivery. Thanks

Great book great movie great play. One of my absolute favorites I totally understood but this young girl was going through I actually went through the very same thing when I was around her age maybe even younger. I would always be enthralled and my breath just taken away when I would go to a wedding. Because I wanted to be the bride I wanted to be married and I always envied the bride. And how great it must feel to go and be whisked away by a wonderful husband. I wanted the fairytale at such a young age. And I remember Saturdays kids would always go to the mall and to the movies with their friends and family and I would remember feeling so left out because there were many Saturdays where I was just sitting home with nothing to do and back then there was no cable there was no VHS or dvd. And I remember the loneliness of The Emptiness in the boredom the extreme boredom to the point where I would sit on my grandmother's porch and just watch Cars Go by. I so totally understood the term well that this young girl was going through. This book is so well written so well performed. And just as Ethel Waters had sang old hymns so did my grandmother. Just a phenomenal story

I am sucker for southern literature surrounding the post-CIvil War/pre-Civil Rights eras. Can't get enough Faulkner. Carson McCullers has my attention too - but for very different reasons.The main character of this matter is a young tomboy Frankie who leads the reader to make every inference, but never delivering the blunt proclamation. She is lesbian, but at 12 years of age, she cannot recite that emotion nor understand it. Dorothy Allison who writes the introduction, find this coming of age angry and confused young woman to be like her own Bone  Bastard Out of Carolina . How about Scout of  To Kill a Mockingbird ? The southern literature has many of these young women on written pages.Southerners overtly spew their disdain for racial interaction, homosexual rights and the more. But, hidden within the confines of the family home, those very issues experienced by family members are embraced and "not discussed" by the loving family members. Covert acceptance, overt denial.McCullers' strongest points may be the ability to grasp youth. She nailed it in her The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter . She nails it here as well. But, this literature approaches a more difficult issue - newly felt and discovered homosexual feelings. And, for literature of the 1940's, this topic had to be delicately approached. Censorship was not unknown, and was in fact growing in the impending decade with flakes like Sen. McCarthy who accompanied character assassinations with J. Edgar Hoover.This is a quick and adoring read.

Great to read this classic again.