Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007)

Madeleine L'Engle Camp began writing stories, poems and journals at a young age. When she was 12, she moved with her parents to the French Alps and went to an English boarding school. She attended high school back in the USA at Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, vacationing with her mother in an old cottage on Florida Beach.

She majored in English at Smith College and graduated with honors in 1941. She moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village in New York, worked in the theater, and published her first two novels, A Small Rain (1945) and Ilsa (1946). In 1946, she married Hugh Franklin, an actor, whom she met while an understudy in Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard. The couple moved to Connecticut to raise their family on a small dairy farm village with more cows than people; they later returned to New York City with three children. Madeleine began an association with the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, where she was the librarian and maintained an office for more than 30 years. She produced more than 60 books during her career.