Madeleine L'Engle

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-09-05

Madeleine L'Engle was born Madeleine L'Engle Camp on November 29, 1918, in New York City; her mother was a pianist and her father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, a writer, critic, and foreign correspondent, while her maternal grandfather co-founded Barnett Bank in Jacksonville, Florida. Due to her parents' disagreements about child-rearing, she attended multiple boarding schools, including one in Switzerland and Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, before graduating cum laude from Smith College in 1941. L'Engle published her first story at age five and began keeping a journal at eight, going on to write across children's literature, essays, poetry, Christian fiction, and science fiction over a career spanning 1945 to 2007. Her most famous novel, A Wrinkle in Time (1962), was rejected more than thirty times before publication and became her signature achievement, launching the Time Quintet series; she also wrote the multi-volume Austin Family Chronicles. She received the Newbery Medal in 1963, the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1998, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004, along with multiple honorary doctorates and induction into the New York Writers Hall of Fame in 2011. L'Engle died of natural causes on September 6, 2007, at age eighty-eight, in Litchfield, Connecticut, and is interred at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.

Universe(s)

Books

• A Wrinkle in Time (1962) · Time Quintet Core Canon
• A Wind in the Door (1973) · Time Quintet Core Canon
• A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) · Time Quintet Core Canon
• Many Waters (1986) · Time Quintet Core Canon
• An Acceptable Time (1989) · Time Quintet Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 5 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 1 (1 won)

← All authors