Madelein e L'Engle was born Madeleine L'Engle Camp on November 29, 1918, in New York City. The only child of a well-known journalist and a pianist, she had an unconventional childhood, surrounded from her earliest days by her parents' highly creative friends. She enjoyed solitude and developed a richly imaginative inner life, which she first began to translate into stories when she was five years old.

When she was a teen-ager, her father's poor health forced the family to move to Switzerland, where she attended a boarding school, an experience which she loathed. Nevertheless, her time at the boarding school later served as material for several novels. After graduating with honors from Smith College, she wrote her first novel, The Small Rain (1945), while working as an actress in New York City. In 1946 she met actor Hugh Franklin, with whom she was working in a play, and...