Editors rejected L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time 26 times

Today, Madeleine L’Engle stands as a literary icon, an entrancer of millions of readers whose genre-busting classic A Wrinkle in Time rolled out recently as a full-bore, Disney-fuelled, Oprah-graced $103-million movie extravaganza. But in December 1960, she was holding yet another letter from a publisher saying “No thanks” to the book that would become a blockbuster.

“This is pleasantly done — but for me there isn’t quite enough story value,” said the two-sentence blowoff from Mercury editor Robert Mills dated Dec. 10. It was one of a string of stinging rejections that L’Engle lamented throughout her career but that have not been shared publicly before.

“Thanks, but I do not think MRS. WHATSIT &c. (the book’s working title was Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which), is for us,” said a Sept. 16 rejection from Franklin Watts editor David C. Knight.

L’Engle would speak for decades about the crisis of confidence she suffered as publisher after publisher rejected a manuscript she believed in to her core.

“The trouble finding a home for it remained deeply a part of her,” said L’Engle’s granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis, who with her sister Lena Roy has just written Becoming Madeleine, (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2018), a biography of their grandmother that ends when Wrinkle was finally released to international acclaim.

Wrinkle’s tortured birth is a delicious example of a blindness to brilliance that also afflicted the editors who passed on C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Rudyard Kipling ’s The Jungle Book or The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which Beatrix Potter eventually self-published.

L’Engle has put the number of rejection letters she endured at 26. L’Engle, who died in 2007 at age 88, persisted, continuing to tinker but resisting calls for radical revisions.

A mutual friend put a word in for L’Engle with publisher John Farrar. He agreed to read the manuscript, which she dropped off on Jan. 16, 1961. Two days later, he responded that he was intrigued but asked for more time. Eventually her agent called: Farrar, Straus & Giroux wanted her book.

A Wrinkle in Time arrived in bookstores in January 1962 and won the Newbury Medal in 1963.