Madeleine L'Engle
1 book analyzed
Biography
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) was the daughter of a journalist father and a pianist mother, grew up in New York City and later rural Connecticut, and spent her adult life as a writer who was also a working church volunteer (she served as librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan for decades). She married actor Hugh Franklin and they ran a general store in rural Connecticut for a decade while she wrote. A Wrinkle in Time was rejected by 26 publishers over two years — too strange, too complex, too religious for secular publishers and too scientific for religious ones. It was finally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1962 and won the Newbery Medal in 1963. L'Engle described the book as coming to her during a cross-country camping trip with her family — specifically the idea of a tesseract — while she was in a period of serious doubt about both her faith and her career. She was a scientist's wife (her husband's brother was a physicist) who believed science and theology were not opponents but different vocabularies for the same reality.