Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle was an American author whose A Wrinkle in Time blended science, theology, and adventure into one of the most beloved and frequently challenged books in children's literature.

Madeleine L’Engle submitted A Wrinkle in Time to publishers for two years and collected 26 rejections before Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it in 1962. It won the Newbery Medal the following year, establishing L’Engle as a major voice in children’s literature. The novel — about a girl named Meg Murry who travels through time and space to rescue her scientist father from a dark evil — is genuinely unusual: it fuses physics, Christian mysticism, and a narrative about a girl who succeeds not by becoming conventionally heroic but by embracing her own specific, stubborn love.

The book has been challenged and banned throughout its publishing history by two completely opposed groups: religious conservatives who object to its unconventional theology and its favorable treatment of figures including Einstein alongside Jesus, and secular critics who object to its explicit Christian themes. This dual condemnation is, in its way, a tribute to how strange and resistant the novel actually is. L’Engle was a serious Episcopalian who believed in the compatibility of science and faith, and that conviction shapes a novel that takes both cosmology and love seriously.

A Wrinkle in Time is not without weaknesses — the final act can feel rushed compared to the conceptual richness of the middle section, and some of the later volumes in the Time Quintet do not match its quality. But for readers who encountered it as children, it tends to remain important because it was one of the first books that argued a bookish, awkward, rule-breaking girl could be exactly the right person to save the world.