A Wrinkle in Time is Madeleine L'Engle's first and most popular book for young adults. It was written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, though the book was rejected numerous times by publishers before finally being published in 1962, just before L'Engle was about to give up on the manuscript once and for all. It is the first in a series featuring Meg Murry and Calvin O'Keefe called The Time Quartet.
After finally being published, the book won many prestigious awards, including the Newbery Medal, Sequoyah Book Award, and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and was runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award.
L'Engle came up with the idea for the novel after reading about Albert Einstein's theories of time and space while traveling through the landscape of Upper New York during the springtime. These dual themes of beauty and science create two of the foundations for the novel. Her goal was to make a world that was "creative and yet believable" and as a result, L'Engle grounds the mystical aspects of the novel in actual theories of physics.
The novel is further grounded in a Christian framework built around L'Engle's own understandings of Christian universalism - the notion that all human beings have the ability to be saved. These ideas of Christianity are scattered throughout the book, as are quotes from the Bible, including the Book of Isaiah and the Book of Romans. This reliance on an ideal of liberal theology, as well as some of the book's more mystical and magical elements, has led A Wrinkle in Time to be banned in some school districts, especially in more conservative parts of the United States.
