Carson McCullers is best known as a novelist, for it is her early novels, written when she was in her twenties, that assure her position among the preeminent writers of her generation. But McCullers's published work also includes two plays, and the first of these, a dramatization of her novel The Member of the Wedding (1946), established her reputation as a playwright as well. The play is of interest for several reasons. It is, as Gerald Weales has noted, one of the few examples in American drama of a novelist's successfully adapting her own work for the stage. Furthermore, its dramatic structure was innovative, rejecting conventional plotting devices in favor of an emphasis on character, theme, and mood. A commercial and critical triumph, the play ran 501 performances, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1950 for best play of the season, took two Donaldson awards in 1949-1950 as...