Friday, September 07, 2007

Madeleine L'Engle 1918-2007

Madeleine L'Engle, author of the Newbery Award-winning novel for young readers A Wrinkle In Time, died yesterday of natural causes in Connecticut. She was 88 years old. The New York Times has a full obituary.

L'Engle wrote more than fifty books, including poetry, plays, autobiography, and devotionals, but was best known for her novels for teenagers. Most of those novels were intricately interconnected into a complex universe, crossing genres and styles and spanning decades as they told the stories of several families: the Austins, the Murrys, the O'Keefes.

I don't know if young readers still come to A Wrinkle in Time as they did when I was young; I suspect it was the first fantastic book of many readers of my generation. It's an odd, quirky book: beloved by millions, but able to intensely annoy both physicists and Christians with its sentimental science-tinged religion. (or should that be religion-tinged science?) L'Engle had an awareness of death and loss that isn't as common in the Young Adult field as it should be; she always managed the difficult balancing act of writing of a universe full of love in which bad things still happened.

L'Engle was never of the science fiction field, but she led many readers there; for that, and for all of the other gifts of her works, she will be greatly missed.
Your Hornswoggler is Andrew Wheeler Released into the wild 9/07/2007 04:37:00 PM
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2 comments:

John Klima said...

My niece (who's now 12) read A Wrinkle in Time for school two years ago and then wanted the whole series for Christmas. Being a good uncle, I got them for her.

And as a young adult librarian, it's a book and series that go out with good regularity. I think it's still many people's introduction to fantastic literature today.

Fri Sep 07, 05:45:00 PM 2007
Anonymous said...

John Podhoretz posted this yesterday on NRO's 'The Corner" blog-

Madeleine L'Engle at Home

You know her as the author of A Wrinkle in Time — possibly the best and most memorable young person's novel written in the United States since World War II. If you're lucky, you read or sampled a dozen or more of the 60-odd books she wrote for children and adults before passing away on Thursday at the age of 88.

Madeleine L'Engle was our neighbor growing up. She lived on the 9th floor at 924 West End Avenue in apartment 95; we lived on the 6th floor in apartment 65. There was one elevator for this line of apartments and therefore everybody in them came to know each other quite well, especially since the elevator had a habit of breaking down and trapping a few of us in it for 20 minutes at a time.

As a young boy, I knew her as the kind-faced and friendly woman with the two fluffy big nice dogs (in contrast to the constantly barking and lunging German Shepherds who lived on 12 and scared the bejeezus out of me and everybody else). Then, when I was 9 or 10, I read A Wrinkle in Time and my sister Naomi told me offhandedly that she was its author.

I wrote her the first fan letter of my life and, heart pounding, rode the elevator to 9 and slipped it under her door. Within hours a package was left at our door with an inscribed copy of its recently published sequel, A Wind at the Door, a box of baked chocolate chip cookies, and a response that was so appreciative I could hardly believe it, it was so gracious and thoughtful. I had grown up with writers whose friends were all writers and one thing I had learned even at that ludicrously tender age is that saying anything to any author about his or her work is to enter into an emotional minefield.

Madeleine had sold more copies of her work than any of my parents' friends, and probably had received more fan mail than any of them, but her letter had a tone of delight to it that not only suggested she understood how to write to a child, but also that she had about her an almost supernatural grace — suitable to someone who was a very serious churchgoing Episcopalian and the author of several novels for adults about the difficulties and joys of faith. I was particularly taken with The Love Letters, in which a young woman finds herself absorbed in the story of St. Teresa of Avila.

These were books I read the old-fashioned way — by finding them haphazardly at public libraries around New York over the years of my boyhood and adolescence. I would have 15 second discussions of them with her in the elevator as we traveled down or up. I was slightly abashed to be speaking so gushingly, and I think she sensed that and always made it seem as though I had made her day or her week.

Her late husband, Hugh Franklin, was as lovely as she — a working actor on soap operas and in theater around New York who would leave tickets at the box office for me whenever he was performing. This, needless to say, is not something most actor neighbors in New York would do.

My parents moved out of 924 West End Avenue in 1979, and I never saw Madeleine after that. But I still read her — she wrote a moving account of her marriage in a book called Two Part Invention that she published after Hugh's death in 1986. And I still knew she was around, still serving as the writer in residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on 111th and Amsterdam — a New York landmark that appeared in several of her books set in our Upper West Side neighborhood.

So for those who were moved and affected by A Wrinkle in Time, or the Austins books, or her trilogy of memoirs about faith, I just wanted you to know that their author was a wonderful neighbor, a wonderful person, and a model of social and personal grace. I was profoundly lucky to have had the chance to spend time with her in an elevator that kept breaking down.

Sat Sep 08, 12:53:00 PM 2007

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