Madeleine L'Engle papers

Madeleine L’Engle, was an author of children’s stories, plays, poetry, fiction, religious tracts, autobiographies, and science fiction, best known for her children’s classic A Wrinkle in Time. Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in Manhattan on Nov. 29, 1918, the only child of Madeleine Hall Barnett and Charles Wadsworth Camp. Her mother was a pianist; her father was a World War I veteran who worked as a foreign correspondent. His lungs were so damaged by mustard gas that he quit his job after the war and began writing drama and music reviews for The New York Sun, short stories, movies, and plays.

L'Engle spent her early years with her parents and her English nanny, Mrs. O'Connell in Manhattan. Her early schooling was difficult, since she was unpopular with her peers and regarded as stupid by her teacher. Madeleine wrote her first story at 5 and retreated into writing. When she won a poetry contest in the fifth grade, her teacher accused her of plagiarizing and her mother had to intervened to prove her innocence. The following year, her parents sent her to a new school, Todhunter.

In 1930, Charles Camp developed pneumonia and his doctors encouraged him to leave New York. The family moved to Switzerland, and L'Engle was sent to Chatelard, a girls' boarding school in Montreaux, Switzerland. When L'Engle was 14, her grandmother, Dearma, became seriously ill and the Camps moved to Florida to be with her. That fall, L'Engle was sent to Ashley Hall Boarding School in Charleston, South Carolina. She was an active student, participating in plays and serving on the student council as president. In 1936, her father died. L'Engle graduated from Ashley Hall the following June. In the fall, she attended Smith College, majoring in English, where she graduated with her BA in 1941.

Returning to New York, L’Engle began to get small acting parts. Several plays she had written were produced. She published her first novel, The Small Rain, in 1945. She met the actor Hugh Franklin and they married in 1946. Their daughter Josephine was born the next year. The family moved to the small town of Goshen, where they lived in a 200-year-old country house called Crosswicks. Franklin continued to tour with acting companies, often being away most of the year. When L'Engle became pregnant again in 1951, however, Franklin decided to get a job near Crosswicks and the family moved there permanently. On March 24, 1952, their son, Bion, was born. The young family bought the Goshen General Store, and began handling both mail and groceries for the small town. In 1956, they adopted their daughter Maria.

When all the children were off at school, L'Engle began to write Meet the Austins, a book inspired by her own family. The work was to be one of the first of a successful series for L'Engle. Meet the Austins earned its place on the list of the American Library Association's Notable Children's books of 1960.

By 1959, the family was ready for a change. They sold the General Store and opted to again use Crosswicks as a summer home and return to New York for the winter months. During this time, L’Engle began writing her classic novel for young adults, A Wrinkle in Time. The book was rejected by 26 publishers before editors at Farrar, Straus & Giroux read it and enthusiastically accepted it. It proved to be her masterpiece, winning the John Newbery Medal as the best children’s book of 1963, the American Library Association's Notable Book Award, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and the Hans Christian Andersen Runner-up Award. At the time of her death, the book had sold eight million copies. Wrinkle has been one of the most banned books in the United States, accused by religious conservatives of offering an inaccurate portrayal of God and nurturing in the young an unholy belief in myth and fantasy. L’Engle, who often wrote about her Christian faith, was taken aback by the attacks. Wrinkle is part of L’Engle’s Time series of children’s books, which includes A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters and An Acceptable Time.

Hugh Franklin began acting again soon after the sale of the store, eventually settling into the role of Dr. Charles Tyler on the television program All My Children. L'Engle continued to write and broadened her scope to nonfiction and religion. Franklin's death in 1986 inspired a book about her life with him, Two Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, published in 1988. Other works from around this period included Dragons in the Waters (1976) and A House like a Lotus (1984). L'Engle also wrote several collections of poetry and in 1982 she published a sequel to The Small Rain, called A Severed Wasp.

L'Engle served as writer in residence at Victoria magazine in 1995. She also served as writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, where she had also been a librarian for over 30 years. L'Engle continued to write and to lecture, teaching writing workshops at universities and churches. Her works in the 1990s include The Glorious Impossible (1990), Certain Women (1992), Troubling a Star (1994), A Live Coal in the Sea (1996), and Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols (1996). L'Engle also wrote on religious topics, publishing such works as Sold into Egypt: Joseph's Journey into Human Being (1989), Anytime Prayers (1994), Glimpses of Grace: Daily Thoughts and Reflections (1996), and Bright Evening Star: Mystery of the Incarnation (1997). L’Engle died in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 2007.

Bibliography Martin, D. (2007). Madeleine L’Engle - Obituary. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/08/books/08lengle.html [Accessed 30 Jul. 2019]. Gale Research Inc. (1998). Encyclopedia of world biography. Detroit: Gale Research.