Madeleine L'Engle is a writer who resists easy classification. She has successfully published plays, poems, essays, autobiographies, and novels for both children and adults. She is probably best known for her "Time Fantasy" series of children's books, including A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. These novels combine elements of science fiction and fantasy with L'Engle's constant themes of family love and moral responsibility.

As the daughter of a respected journalist and a gifted pianist, L'Engle was surrounded by creative people from birth. She wrote her first stories at the age of five. She was an only child; in her autobiographies she writes of how much she enjoyed her solitude and of the rich fantasy life she created for herself.

Speaking of her childhood, L'Engle explains in The Summer of the Great-Grandmother: "[My mother] was almost forty when I was born...