Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle wrote her first story when she was five years old. She did not perform well at the NYC private school she attended, and spent the subsequent years at different boarding schools and traveling extensively with her parents, who disagreed about how she ought to be raised. France and Switzerland were among the countries she lived in in her youth. Her father died in 1935 while she was living at a boarding school in South Carolina. In 1937, she attended Smith College, and graduated four years later cum laude. The next year, once she had moved to New York City, she met her husband, actor Hugh Franklin, when she had a role in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, and they married four years later. They had two children, Josephine and Bion, and adopted Maria, the 7-year-old daughter of family friends who had died. For a while the family lived in an ancient farmhouse in Connecticut and ran a general store to supply their income. In 1959, they returned to New York City so Hugh could keep acting, during which time L'Engle first thought of and wrote A Wrinkle in Time. She had a hard time finding a publisher, and was rejected over thirty times before Farrar, Straus and Giroux picked it up in 1962. Many of her other books occur in the same universe as that of A Wrinkle in Time. In her years in New York City, L'Engle (a strong Episcopalian) was a volunteer librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where she was buried after dying of natural causes in 2007.