12:22PM EDT: Publishers Weekly is reporting that Madeleine L’Engle passed away last night at the age of 89. Their article is available at this link. This article will be updated as soon as we know more.
Later update: L’Engle’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux announced her death on 6 September 2007 of natural causes. L’Engle is perhaps best known for the children’s classic A Wrinkle In Time (which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963), but she had more than 60 books to her credit.
She wrote her first novel, The Small Rain, in 1945, but her writing career didn’t get off to a great start, and she thought of quitting in 1958, but Meet the Austins was published in 1960, by which time she was far into writing A Wrinkle In Time. Austins was the first of her highly successful series, and from there, her writing career was assured. In 1997, she won the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in Manhattan, New York, on 29 November 1918, attended a boarding school in Switzerland, and graduated from Smith College with a degree in English. After college, she returned to New York to try a career as a stage actress. She married actor Hugh Franklin in 1946 (he went on to star on All My Children for 13 years), and had a daughter (Josephine) in 1947. Her son, Bion, was born in 1952, and they adopted another daughter, Maria, in 1956. Franklin died in 1986, and Bion in 1999. L’Engle is survived by her daughters, five grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
L’Engle’s official web site, www.madeleinelengle.com, has a complete bibliography of her work. The New York Times has a very nice obituary on this page.
(Thanks to Michael A. Burstein for his assistance with this article.)