Madeleine L'Engle was born 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 L'Engle was sent to boarding school. Because the school's schedule did not allow her the solitude to which she was accustomed, she loathed it. Her experiences there later served as material for several novels, including her first one, The Small Rain (1945), which she wrote while working in New York as an actress after graduating with honors from Smith College. In 1946 she married Hugh Franklin, the leading actor...