L'ENGLE, Madeleine

   Working name of US actress and writer Madeleine L'Engle Camp (1918-), whose first play, 18 Washington Square, South (1944), was produced in 1940, and who performed on the stage during the early 1940s. Her firstnovel, The Small Rain (1945), and some of its successors are non-genre fictions for adult audiences, but from And Both Were Young (1949) most of her work has been for children. She gained immediate and lasting acclaim for A WRINKLE IN TIME (1962), which was both her first sf novel and the first volume of the Meg Murray sequence, which includes also A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Many Waters (1986) and AnAcceptable Time (1989). A WRINKLE IN TIME, which won the 1963 Newbery Medal and various later awards, follows the adventures of the children of Dr Murray, a scientist abducted to a distant planet where he is held in thrall to a central COMPUTER intelligence. The tight plot and ample moral scope of the tale make Meg Murray's rescue of her father into one of the more memorable moments in CHILDREN'S SF. Later novels similarly expose the Murray family to adventures and stresses, and develop a telling portraitof complex young people. The Canon Tallis sequence - The Arm of the Starfish (1965) and The Young Unicorns (1968) - is also of interest.ML'E's singletons include Dance in the Desert (1969) and The Sphinx at Dawn (coll of linked stories 1982).

   JC