Carson McCullers (1917-67) was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, the model for Frankie Addams's hometown in the play. Although she experienced a relatively happy childhood, McCullers grew dissatisfied and bored with the restrictive life in a Southern mill town, where, she claimed, nothing ever happened: Like young Frankie Addams in the play, the adolescent McCullers considered herself a gangly, boyish outsider who was excessively tall, and she too dreamed of traveling to more exotic locales. In The Member of the Wedding, Frankie Addams's adolescent frustration and dreams manifest themselves against a backdrop of war, racial turmoil, and tumultuous changes in her Southern homeland.
World War II in Alaska and Luxembourg. When the play opens, the end of World War II is in sight. Frankie Addams, the main character, and her family are welcoming Frankie's brother, Jarvis, back from Alaska, where he has been stationed in the army. In June of 1942, while the Battle of Midway was being fought farther south in the Pacific Ocean, the Japanese had seized the Aleutian islands of Kiska and Attu, which were situated only about one thousand miles from the Alaskan peninsula.
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