Author
Madeleine L'Engle ’41 Dies at 88
Award-winning author and
Smith alumna Madeleine L’Engle
Camp ’41 died Thursday, September 6, at the age of
88.
L’Engle began writing
at age 5 and by the time she received an honorary
degree from Smith in 1986, she had written 25 highly acclaimed
books, including the one for which she is best known,
A Wrinkle in Time.
 That sucess was not always
easily attained, something L’Engle
later reflected upon in a biography she submitted to the
college. At the time of her graduation with a degree in English,
L’Engle said, “I left Smith assuming that all
doors were open to me. That’s a useful attitude for
opening the occasional closed one.”
That metaphor was certainly
true in the case of A
Wrinkle in Time, which was rejected by 26 publishers
before it was accepted by the editors at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
The book went on to win the John Newberry Medal as the best
children’s book of 1963 and has, so far, sold more
than eight million copies.
Former President Mary
Maples Dunn referenced A Wrinkle
in Time when she granted L’Engle the honorary
degree Doctor of Letters, saying, “You knew what skeptical
editors did not: that children and adults alike would understand
your blend of science and fiction and treasure your writings
about the interconnectedness of all creation.”
Earlier in L’Engle’s career, in 1977, she delivered
the commencement address at Smith, telling seniors, “You
will not heal all the ills of the world, but you can show
in your own living and loving . . . that the whole of you
is made up of both intellect and intuition, mind and heart.”
She returned to her alma mater on several other occasions
including in 1981, to receive the Smith College Medal, and
in 1988 and 1994, to deliver lectures.
When L’Engle visited campus in 1997 for the alumna-in-residence
program, students surprised her with a birthday cake, having
learned that the visit coincided with the date. That program
provided students the opportunity to meet and talk with L’Engle
about her career and life choices, such information she also
shared in her alumna record.
In her record, she noted
the “major turning points
in her adult life” were working as an actress in a
theater in New York, where she met and married actor Hugh
Franklin. Then, she added, “having children with
all the conflicts that come to the mother who also works” and “a
long decade of rejection slips after five published books.”
Perhaps the most recent
Smith news concerning L’Engle
was in 1999, when English faculty member Patricia Skarda
included her work in a publication of literary selections
by Smith alumnae titled Smith Voices.
But L’Engle’s alma
mater would not be the final home for papers that reveal
her voice—those are in
the L’Engle Collection at Wheaton College. About her
decision to donate her papers to another college, L’Engle
once noted, “Smith asked ten years too late.”—Kristen
Cole
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