RIP Madeleine L'Engle

[trane_fanatic]

I loved "A Wrinkle In Time" when I was a kid.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070907/ap_on_re_us/obit_l_engle

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Author Madeleine L'Engle dies at 88

By CARA RUBINSKY, Associated Press Writer

HARTFORD, Conn. - Author Madeleine L'Engle, whose novel "A Wrinkle in Time" has been enjoyed by generations of schoolchildren and adults since the 1960s, has died, her publicist said Friday. She was 88.

L'Engle died Thursday at a nursing home in Litchfield of natural causes, according to Jennifer Doerr, publicity manager for publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The Newbery Medal winner wrote more than 60 books, including fantasies, poetry and memoirs, often highlighting spiritual themes and her Christian faith.

Although L'Engle was often labeled a children's author, she disliked that classification. In a 1993 Associated Press interview, she said she did not write down to children.

"In my dreams, I never have an age," she said. "I never write for any age group in mind. When people do, they tend to be tolerant and condescending and they don't write as well as they can write.

"When you underestimate your audience, you're cutting yourself off from your best work."

"A Wrinkle in Time" — which L'Engle said was rejected repeatedly before it found a publisher in 1962 — won the American Library Association's 1963 Newbery Medal for best American children's book. Her "A Ring of Endless Light" was a Newbery Honor Book, or medal runner-up, in 1981.

In 2004, President Bush awarded her a National Humanities Medal.

"Wrinkle" tells the story of adolescent Meg Murry, her genius little brother Charles Wallace, and their battle against evil as they search across the universe for their missing father, a scientist.

L'Engle followed it up with further adventures of the Murry children, including "A Wind in the Door," 1973; "A Swiftly Tilting Planet," 1978, which won an American Book Award; and "Many Waters," 1986.

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Associated Press writers Polly Anderson in New York and John Christoffersen in New Haven contributed to this report.

[Nate Dorward]

Wow, didn't know she was still around. R.I.P.

Truthfully, I recently revisited A Wrinkle in Time (that's one of the pleasures of having a kid: you get to reread all the books you read as a kid) & didn't think it stood up at all well. Oh well, sometimes it's best to let memories of a book lie.

[Hot Ptah]

Last year I read A Wrinkle in Time aloud to my daughter. I liked it more than she did (she was ten at the time). She found the idea of the evil brain on a slab too distateful.

Before reading it last year, I had generally favorable memories of it, without being able to remember much about it. With my recent re-reading, I wonder why I liked it as a kid. It's rather powerful, negative stuff, a bleak vision of the universe. The idea that Earth contains a disproportionate share of the universe's good guys must have resonated well in the early 1960s, during the Cold War (substitute the U.S.A. for Earth and you have the idea).