Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle Camp was born in New York City on November 29, 1918, the daughter of Charles Wadsworth Camp, a writer, critic, and foreign correspondent, and Madeleine Hall Barnett, a pianist. Her maternal grandfather was Bion Barnett, co-founder of Barnett Bank in Jacksonville, Florida. L'Engle was named after her great-grandmother, Madeleine Margaret L'Engle. She began writing stories at age five and keeping a journal at age eight, though her early literary inclinations did not translate into academic success at the New York City private school she attended. Her parents enrolled her in a series of boarding schools, and the family traveled extensively, at one point relocating to a château near Chamonix in the French Alps. In 1933, following her grandmother's illness, the family moved near Jacksonville, Florida, and L'Engle attended Ashley Hall boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. Her father died in October 1936.

L'Engle attended Smith College from 1937 to 1941, graduating cum laude, after which she returned to New York City. She published her novels The Small Rain and Ilsa prior to 1942. In 1945, she appeared on Broadway in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, where she met actor Hugh Franklin. The two married on January 26, 1946. Their first daughter, Josephine, was born in 1947. In 1952, the family relocated to a 200-year-old farmhouse called Crosswicks in Goshen, Connecticut, where they purchased and operated a small general store. Their son Bion was born that same year. Four years later, the couple adopted Maria, the daughter of family friends who had died.

The family returned to New York City in 1959 so that Franklin could resume his acting career, a move preceded by a ten-week cross-country camping trip during which L'Engle first conceived the idea for A Wrinkle in Time. She completed the novel by 1960, but it was rejected more than thirty times before being published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1962. The book won the Newbery Medal and became the first in a series of sequels, including A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. From 1960 to 1966, and again in 1986, 1989, and 1990, L'Engle taught at St. Hilda's & St. Hugh's School in New York. In 1965, she became a volunteer librarian at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where she later served as writer-in-residence.

Across the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, L'Engle produced dozens of books for children and adults, including the four-volume Crosswicks Journals series of autobiographical memoirs. The Summer of the Great-grandmother, published in 1974, addressed her experience caring for her aging mother. Two-Part Invention, completed after Hugh Franklin's death from cancer on September 26, 1986, served as a memoir of their marriage. In 1972, L'Engle and Franklin had established the Crosswicks Foundation, a family foundation.

L'Engle was a Christian who attended Episcopal churches and held a belief in universal salvation. Her promotion of Christian universalism led many Christian bookstores to refuse to carry her books, and her work was frequently banned from evangelical Christian schools and libraries. At the same time, some secular critics considered her writing too religious.

In 1991, L'Engle was seriously injured in an automobile accident but recovered sufficiently to visit Antarctica in 1992. Her son Bion Franklin died on December 17, 1999, at age 47, from the effects of prolonged alcoholism. After suffering an intracerebral hemorrhage in 2002, L'Engle became unable to teach or travel due to reduced mobility from osteoporosis. She died of natural causes on September 6, 2007, at Rose Haven, a nursing facility near her home in Litchfield, Connecticut.