mm.. First, Pavoratti died this week.  Now, I read that Madeline L'Engle passed away, as well.  She wrote so many children's books, and was definitely a major part of my own childhood.  Imagination, fantasy, and the spectacular world of Madeline L'Engle helped me live in my own Caroline world.


Madeleine L’Engle, Writer of Children’s Classics, Is Dead at 88

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: September 8, 2007

Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.

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George M. Gutierrez

Madeleine L’Engle at home in New York in 2001.

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.

Her works — poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer — were deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.

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The cosmic battle between light and darkness, good and evil, love and indifference, personified in the mythic fantasies of the ‘Wrinkle in Time’ series, here is waged compellingly in its rightful place: within ourselves,” Carol Van Strum wrote in The Washington Post in 1980.

For the rest of the obituary, read here...