Madeline L'Engle
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| One of the most respected and loved children's authors in America, she received the 1963 Newberry Medal for A Wrinkle in Time.
Madeleine L'Engle was born in New York City, the only child of a foreign correspondent and a gifted pianist. She attended boarding school in Switzerland and graduated cum laude from Smith College in 1941. Madeleine wrote her first novel, The Small Rain (1945) while acting for a New York theater group. She and her future husband, Hugh Franklin, were on tour together when they met and married. After publishing several additional novels while raising three children, the Franklin family moved to western Connecticut and opened a general store. It was here that she experienced the communal life which would inspire much of her work, including "The Austin Family" series, beginning with Meet the Austins, one of the American Library Association's Notable Children's Books of 1960.
Though L'Engle had difficulty finding publishers for her works in the 1950's, with A Wrinkle in Time, her career as a writer took off. The book quickly became a popular and critical success winning the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award as well as the Newberry Medal for "the most distinguished contribution to children's literature" of 1962. Two companion novels, A Wind in the Door (1973) and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), completed what came to be known as The Time Trilogy, a series heralded for its creative blend of fairy tale, science fiction, good old-fashioned story telling, and serious themes of family love and moral responsibility. In the 1970's in addition to continuing to write children\s books, Madeleine began a series of autobiographical works, the "Crosswicks Journals" named after the family's 200-year-old Goshen farmhouse. The final volume, Two Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (1988), is a heart-wrenching account of the devastating illness and death of her husband of 40 years, remembered today for his portrayal of Dr. Charles Taylor on the TV soap opera, "All My Children." Madeleine L'Engle continues to receive honors for her over forty volumes of plays, poems, essays, and novels for children and adults. In the 1980's she was ranked by Publishers Weekly and American Bookseller as one of the five to ten most popular and best-selling children's authors in the country. Madeleine, age 78 at the time of her induction, is still publishing new books at an astonishing rate while also serving as writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. | |||||||||
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