Madeleine L'Engle (; November 29, 1918 – September 6, 2007) was an American writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. L'Engle received the Newbery Medal for her 1962 children's book, A Wrinkle in Time. She also received the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 1998.
Early life and education Madeleine L'Engle Camp was born in New York City on November 29, 1918. She was named after her great-grandmother, Madeleine Margaret L'Engle, who was otherwise known as Mado. Her maternal grandfather was Florida banker Bion Barnett, co-founder of Barnett Bank in Jacksonville, Florida. Her mother, a pianist, was also named Madeleine: Madeleine Hall Barnett. Her father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, was a writer, critic, and foreign correspondent who, according to his daughter, suffered lung damage from mustard gas during World War I.
L'Engle wrote her first story at age five and began keeping a journal at age eight. These early literary attempts did not translate into academic success at the New York City private school where she was enrolled. A shy, awkward child, she struggled to gain acceptance from her peers and teachers, and she often withdrew into books and her own writing. Her favorite book at the time was Emily of New Moon, whose main character L'Engle later said she deeply identified with.
Her parents often disagreed about how to raise her, and as a result she attended a number of boarding schools and had many governesses.
The Camps traveled frequently. At one point, the family moved to a château near Chamonix in the French Alps. As Madeleine later described, the hope was that the cleaner air would be easier on her father's lungs. Madeleine was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland.
In 1933, L'Engle's grandmother fell ill, so the Camps moved near Jacksonville, Florida, to be close to her. L'Engle attended another boarding school, Ashley Hall, in Charleston, South Carolina.
When her father died in October 1936, L'Engle arrived home too late to say goodbye.
L'Engle attended Smith College from 1937 to 1941 and graduated cum laude.
Writing career
L'Engle published her first novel, The Small Rain, in 1945, followed quickly by Ilsa in 1946. She published her first children's book, And Both Were Young, in 1949. Then came Camilla Dickinson, which was published in 1951.
She and her husband, Hugh Franklin, moved to Connecticut in 1952, living in a farm house and running a general store. The pressures of being a wife, mother, and part-time store clerk made it difficult for L'Engle to maintain her writing. A Winter’s Love came out in 1957, which helped bring back her career, but it did not lead to continued success. Her next book, The Lost Innocent, was continually rejected, and she later said that she had decided to give up writing on her 40th birthday (November 1958) when she received yet another rejection notice. "With all the hours I spent writing, I was still not pulling my own weight financially."
Soon she discovered both that she could not give it up and that she had continued to work on fiction subconsciously. She published Meet the Austins in 1960, which became the start of a successful series and which won praise for its innovative approach to dealing with death and grief among young audiences.
During a ten-week cross-country camping trip, L'Engle first had the idea for her most famous novel, A Wrinkle in Time. She completed the book by 1960. It was rejected more than thirty times before she handed it to John C. Farrar; it was finally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1962. Soon after winning the Newbery Medal for her 1962 "junior novel" A Wrinkle in Time, L'Engle discussed children's books in The New York Times Book Review. The writer of a good children's book, she observed, may need to return to the "intuitive understanding of his own childhood," being childlike although not childish. She claimed, "It's often possible to make demands of a child that couldn't be made of an adult... A child will often understand scientific concepts that would baffle an adult. This is because he can understand with a leap of the imagination that is denied the grown-up who has acquired the little knowledge that is a dangerous thing." Of philosophy and science, she said, "the child will come to it with an open mind, whereas many adults come closed to an open book. This is one reason so many writers turn to fantasy (which children claim as their own) when they have something important and difficult to say."
In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, L'Engle wrote dozens of books for children and adults. Four of the books for adults formed the Crosswicks Journals series of autobiographical memoirs. Of these, The Summer of the Great-grandmother (1974) discusses L'Engle's personal experience caring for her aged mother, and Two-Part Invention (1988) is a memoir of her marriage, completed after her husband's death from cancer in 1986.
For L'Engle, who wrote repeatedly about "story as truth", the distinction between fiction and memoir was sometimes blurred. Real events from her life and family history made their way into some of her novels, while fictional elements, such as assumed names for people and places, can be found in her published journals.
Personal life L'Engle met actor Hugh Franklin in 1945 when she appeared off-Broadway in the play The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, and she married him on January 26, 1946. Later she wrote of their meeting and marriage, "We met in The Cherry Orchard and were married in The Joyous Season." The couple's first daughter, Josephine, was born in 1947.
The family moved to a 200-year-old farmhouse called Crosswicks in the small town of Goshen, Connecticut, in 1952. To replace Franklin's lost acting income, they purchased and operated a small general store. Their son Bion was born that same year. Four years later, seven-year-old Maria, the daughter of family friends who had died, came to live with the Franklins and they adopted her shortly thereafter. During this period, L'Engle also served as choir director of the local Congregational church.
The family returned to New York City in 1959 so that Franklin could resume his acting career. In 1960, the Franklins moved to an apartment in the Cleburne Building, located on West End Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Franklin died of cancer on September 26, 1986.
L'Engle was seriously injured in an automobile accident in 1991, but recovered well enough to visit Antarctica in 1992.
L'Engle's son, Bion Franklin, died on December 17, 1999, from the effects of prolonged alcoholism. He was 47 years old.
Religious beliefs L'Engle was a Christian who attended Episcopal churches and believed in universal salvation, writing that "All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones." As a result of her promotion of Christian universalism, many Christian bookstores refused to carry her books, which were also frequently banned from evangelical Christian schools and libraries. At the same time, some of her most secular critics attacked her work for being far too religious.
L’Engle maintained strong ties to the Episcopal church throughout her career and was a librarian and writer in residence at the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City for nearly 30 years.
Her views on divine punishment were similar to those of George MacDonald, who also had a large influence on her fictional work. She said, "I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love."
In 1982, L'Engle reflected on what suffering had taught her. She stated that her "lonely solitude" as a child taught her about the "world of the imagination" that enabled her to write for children. Later she suffered a "decade of failure" after her first books were published. It was a "bitter" experience, yet she wrote that she had "learned a lot of valuable lessons" that enabled her to persevere as a writer.Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 58.
Death L'Engle died of natural causes at Rose Haven, a nursing facility close to her home in Litchfield, Connecticut, on September 6, 2007, according to a statement made by her publicist the following day. She is interred in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.
Awards, honors, and recognition In addition to the numerous awards, medals, and prizes won by individual books L'Engle wrote, she personally received other honors over the years. These included being named an Associate Dame of Justice in the Venerable Order of Saint John (1972); the USM Medallion from The University of Southern Mississippi (1978); the Smith College Medal "for service to community or college which exemplifies the purposes of liberal arts education" (1981); the Sophia Award for distinction in her field (1984); the Regina Medal (1985); the ALAN Award for outstanding contribution to adolescent literature, presented by the National Council of Teachers of English (1987); and the Kerlan Award (1991).
In 1985, she was a guest speaker at the Library of Congress, giving a speech entitled "Dare to be Creative!" That same year she began a two-year term as president of the Authors Guild. In addition she received over a dozen honorary degrees from as many colleges and universities, such as Haverford College. Many of these name her as a Doctor of Humane Letters, but she was also made a Doctor of Literature and a Doctor of Sacred Theology, the latter at Berkeley Divinity School in 1984. In 1995 she was writer-in-residence for Victoria Magazine. In 1997, she was recognized for Lifetime Achievement by the World Fantasy Awards.
L'Engle received the annual Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 1998. The Edwards Award recognizes one writer and a particular body of work for a "significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature." Four books by L'Engle were cited: Meet the Austins, A Wrinkle In Time, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and A Ring of Endless Light (published 1960 to 1980).
In 2004, she received the National Humanities Medal."Madeleine L'Engle". Awards & Honors: 2004 National Humanities Medalist. National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved June 19, 2013.
L'Engle was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame in 2011.
In a 2012 survey of School Library Journal readers, A Wrinkle in Time was voted the best children's novel after Charlotte's Web.Bird, Elizabeth (June 28, 2012). "Top 100 Children's Novels #2: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle". A Fuse 8 Production. Retrieved June 19, 2013.
In 2013, a crater on Mercury was named after L'Engle.
Legacy In 1972, L'Engle and her husband, Hugh Franklin, established the Crosswicks Foundation, a family foundation.
Since 1976, Wheaton College in Illinois has maintained a special collection of L'Engle's papers, and a variety of other materials, dating back to 1919. The Madeleine L'Engle Collection includes manuscripts for the majority of her published and unpublished works, as well as interviews, photographs, audio and video presentations, and an extensive array of correspondence with both adults and children, including artwork sent to her by children.
In 2018, L'Engle's granddaughters, Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Léna Roy, published Becoming Madeleine: A Biography of the Author of A Wrinkle in Time by Her Granddaughters.
A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle by Sarah Arthur was also published in 2018.