Madeleine L'Engle

American · 1918 to 2007

Born Madeleine L'Engle Camp on November 29, 1918, in New York City, named after her great-grandmother, she was the only child of a pianist mother and the writer Charles Wadsworth Camp, whose lungs had been damaged by mustard gas in the trenches. A shy, clumsy girl branded stupid by her teachers at a Manhattan private school, she retreated into books and her own journals, writing her first story at five and keeping a diary from eight. The family moved between a château in the French Alps and a boarding school in Switzerland in pursuit of clean air for her father's failing lungs; he died in October 1936, and she arrived home from her Charleston boarding school, Ashley Hall, too late to say goodbye. She read English at Smith, graduated cum laude in 1941, met the actor Hugh Franklin during a production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, married him in 1946, and raised three children in a Connecticut farmhouse called Crosswicks in the town of Goshen. To replace her husband's lost acting income, the family ran a small general store. On her fortieth birthday, weighed down by rejections, she resolved to quit writing, then immediately broke the resolve. The idea for A Wrinkle in Time (1962) came on a cross-country camping trip in 1959; it was rejected more than thirty times before Farrar, Straus and Giroux took it and it won the Newbery Medal. She extended the Murry family into A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), and Many Waters (1986), served for thirty years as librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, and died on September 6, 2007, in Litchfield, Connecticut, at the age of eighty-eight.