Madeleine L’Engle Dies at 88
By SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 9/7/2007 1:56:00 PM
Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote the Newbery Award–winning fantasy classic A Wrinkle in Time (1962), died yesterday of natural causes at a nursing home in Litchfield, CT. She was 88.
L’Engle had been in failing health for some time and was under hospice care, says Jennifer Doerr, publicity manager for the author’s publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
L’Engle wrote dozens of books for children and adults, including four companion novels to A Wrinkle in Time: A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Many Waters (1986), and An Acceptable Time (1989), which have come to be known as The Time Quintet.
L’Engle was born in Manhattan and grew up in New York City, Switzerland, South Carolina, and Massachusetts. She graduated cum laude from Smith College in 1941, but returned to New York to work in the theater. L’Engle wrote her first book, The Small Rain, in 1945, while touring with Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut in Uncle Harry. She met her future husband, Hugh Franklin, when they both appeared in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard with Le Gallienne.
The couple married in 1946 and had a daughter, Josephine, the following year. Their son Bion, was born in 1952, and four years later they adopted another child, Maria. During this time, the family moved to western Connecticut after Franklin temporarily retired from the theater. While there they opened a general store. “A lot of what I learned in our store was of immense value to a writer,” L’Engle has said.
Her writing career got off to such a slow start while she was in her 30s that she almost gave it up. But eventually things starting picking up. In 1960, she published Meet the Austins—a coming of age story about a busy household—and she had started writing A Wrinkle in Time, which was inspired by a family camping trip. The Austin series contains five additional books, including A Ring of Endless Light (1980), which was a Newbery Honor Book.
After 10 years in Connecticut, the family moved back to New York City, where Franklin returned to the theater and gained fame for his role as Dr. Charles Tyler in the television series All My Children. Franklin died in 1986 and Bion in 1999.
L’Engle received numerous awards, including National Humanities Medal, which honors those whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities; the ALAN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Adolescent Literature from the National Council of Teachers of English; and the Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Library Association.
L’Engle lectured nationally and internationally, and for about three decades she was the librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City.
Visit L’Engle’s Web site (www.madeleinelengle.com) for a full bibliography, audio interviews, and a photo gallery.
She is survived by her daughters Josephine Jones and Maria Rooney; her grandchildren Lena Roy, Charlotte Jones Voiklis, Edward Jones, Bryson Rooney, and Alexander Rooney; as well as her great grandchildren Kosta Voiklis, Cooper Roy, Magda Voiklis, Finn Roy, and Scarlett Roy.
