A Wrinkle in Time was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1962 after being rejected by twenty-six publishers. It won the Newbery Medal in 1963 and has sold over fourteen million copies. The novel invented a genre — children’s science fiction with theological underpinnings — that had no real precedent in American literature.
Meg Murry is thirteen, awkward, brilliant at math, and furious about her father’s disappearance. Her father, a physicist, vanished while working on a project involving tesseracts — five-dimensional “wrinkles” in the fabric of space-time. Three supernatural beings (Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, Mrs Which) appear and transport Meg, her five-year-old prodigy brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O’Keefe through a tesseract to the planet Camazotz.
Camazotz is controlled by IT — a giant disembodied brain that enforces absolute conformity. All citizens bounce balls in rhythm, all houses are identical, all thought is synchronized. Mr. Murry is imprisoned there. Charles Wallace is captured by IT. Meg must rescue him — and the weapon she uses is love. Not abstract love, but the specific, imperfect, frustrated love of a sister for a brother.
L’Engle’s theology infuses the novel without dominating it: the battle against IT is explicitly a battle against evil (the “Dark Thing” that shadows planets across the universe), and the forces of good include Jesus, Buddha, Einstein, and Bach.
Collecting A Wrinkle in Time
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1962): Blue boards with dust jacket. First printing has FSG seal on copyright page.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $3,000–$8,000
- Very good in jacket: $1,000–$3,000
- Good, no jacket: $200–$500
- Signed first: $5,000–$15,000