1918-2007 · American novelist, poet and essayist, author of A Wrinkle in Time
About Madeleine L'Engle
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) was an American novelist, poet and essayist, born in New York City. After a brief stage career she married the actor Hugh Franklin and for some years ran a general store with him in rural Connecticut, near their farmhouse, Crosswicks. A lifelong Episcopalian, she later served as librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. A Wrinkle in Time began her Time Quintet of Murry and O'Keefe family novels; her nonfiction includes the Crosswicks Journals and Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (1980). She received the National Humanities Medal in 2004.
Meg Murry is a stubborn, clumsy, unhappy girl with glasses and braces who is doing badly at school, and whose physicist father has been missing for more than a year on secret government work. On a stormy night she comes down to the kitchen of the family's country house to find her mother, a scientist, and her five-year-old brother Charles Wallace, an uncannily gifted child the village thinks is slow.