Madeleine L’Engle was born in New York City on 29th November, 1918. She had always wanted to be a writer, but she knew she couldn’t make an adequate living as a novelist, at least, not right away. So she found work in the theatre, and did a bunch of odd jobs, and took small parts in plays while writing as much and as often as she could.
She sent a bunch of her short stories to different magazines and had a fair few of them accepted. This encouraged her to send out the manuscript of her first novel, The Small Rain, about an aspiring pianist who chooses her art over personal relationships. She’d started working on it while she was in still in college. It was accepted, and published in 1948. It was relatively popular, and it made Madeline enough money to live on for a couple of years.
She met her soon-to-be-husband, the actor, Hugh Franklin while working as an understudy on The Cherry Orchard (Chekov). She published her second novel, Ilsa and then she and Franklin got married and had a baby. Two more kids followed. They decided to leave New York and move to Connecticut to raise the family away from the city in a village which had more cows than people.
The couple bought a derelict general store and ran it for nine years. They moved back to New York after a decade and Hugh went back to acting. They had plenty of good times as a family, but Madeline’s writing career stalled. She kept writing and sending out manuscripts but none of them sold. So many rejections slips piled up that she considered giving up on writing.
Then she happened to read a book about Quantum Physics that fascinated her with the complex and elegant picture of the universe that it presented, and it inspired her to write a science fiction novel for young adults called A Wrinkle in Time, about a group of young children who engage in a cosmic battle against a great evil that abhors individuality. Her children were the first ones to read the book and they loved it.
But the publishing world failed to see what they did. The manuscript was rejected by one publisher after another. Some of them thought that it was too complex a book for children while others were of the opinion that a science fiction novel with a female main character wouldn’t appeal to readers. So Madeline gave up on the book.
A few months later, when her mother was visiting for Christmas, Madeline hosted a tea party for her mother’s old friends. One of them was friends with John Farrar of the publishing house Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. She arranged for Madeline to meet Farrar and show him the manuscript.
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux published A Wrinkle in Time in 1963. It was immediately popular and it won the Newbery Medal that year. Three sequels followed, A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), and Many Waters (1986). A Wrinkle in Time has since sold more than 10 million copies.
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