A Wrinkle in Time Was Rejected 26 Times
Quick answer: A Wrinkle in Time was rejected by 26 publishers before winning the Newbery Medal. How Madeleine L'Engle nearly quit at 40 and kept sending it out anyway.
Madeleine L'Engle spent the evening of her fortieth birthday reading a rejection letter. It arrived, with the sort of timing only real life dares to attempt, on the very day she had privately set as her deadline for making it as a writer. She walked to her typewriter, put the cover on it, and told herself she was finished. The decade behind her supported the decision. Her early novels had slipped out of print. Editors answered, when they answered at all, with printed slips. She was raising three children and helping her husband run a general store in rural Connecticut, and the writing brought in less than the shop's penny candy.
Then, standing in front of the covered typewriter, she caught her own mind in the act: it was already plotting a novel about failure. She took the cover off. The strange book she began soon afterwards, full of tesseracts, dark planets and a furious girl in spectacles, would be turned down by twenty-six publishers before it won the Newbery Medal and settled in as one of the most loved children's novels in the language. She told this birthday story against herself for the rest of her life, and it has comforted writers at their own covered typewriters ever since.
A decade of silence before the storm
L'Engle's career had started promisingly. Her first novel, The Small Rain, appeared in 1945 when she was in her twenties, and it earned respectful notices. Then came the 1950s, the stretch she later called her decade of rejection. Book after book failed to sell or failed to find a publisher at all. She and her husband, the actor Hugh Franklin, had left New York for an old farmhouse called Crosswicks in Goshen, Connecticut, where they ran the village general store to pay the bills.
She kept writing anyway, in the gaps of a life that offered few gaps: after the children slept, between shifts at the store, in notebooks that nobody was asking to see. Her journals from those years, later shaped into the memoir A Circle of Quiet, are one of the most honest records we have of what it feels like to keep working with no external evidence that the work matters. The birthday scene at the typewriter comes from that book, told in her own dry, unsparing voice.
The wrong book at the wrong time
In 1959 the family took a ten-week camping trip across the United States, and somewhere on that drive the names Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which arrived in her head, apparently unannounced. By the end of 1960 she had finished the novel they belonged to. A Wrinkle in Time mixed cosmology with a children's adventure, put a stubborn, unpretty girl at its centre, and treated evil as something real enough to frighten a reader rather than something to be tidied away by the last chapter.
Publishers did not know what to do with it, and for roughly two years they said so. L'Engle herself put the count of rejections at twenty-six, and that is the figure she repeated in interviews and essays for decades. The reasons, as she reported them, clustered around the same worry:
It is worth noticing what none of the rejections said. Nobody, so far as she ever recounted, told her the book was badly written. They told her it did not fit. Those are different verdicts, and a writer who confuses them will quit for the wrong reason.
A tea party and an honest piece of luck
The turn, when it came, did not come through the slush pile. L'Engle's mother was visiting, and a tea party was held in her honour. One of the guests insisted that Madeleine ought to meet John Farrar, of the publishing house Farrar, Straus, and arranged the introduction. Farrar's firm did not even have an established children's list at the time, which may be exactly why the book's strangeness did not disqualify it there.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux published A Wrinkle in Time in 1962. The following year it won the Newbery Medal, the highest award in American children's literature. It has never been out of print since, has sold millions of copies, and opened the way for the four further novels about the Murry family. L'Engle was candid about the luck involved: without that tea party, the manuscript might have gone back into a drawer. But luck could only act on a book that existed, had been finished, and was still in circulation after two years of refusals. She had kept it moving. That was her share of the bargain, and she had paid it in full.
What a working writer can take from this
The first lesson hides in the birthday scene. L'Engle set herself a deadline, reached it, staged her retirement, and discovered within minutes that she was constitutionally unable to stop. Deadlines for success are theatre. The real test is quieter: when nobody is buying, do you still find yourself composing? If the answer is yes, the rejections are information about the market, not about you.
The second lesson is about the word different. Twenty-six professional readers looked at one of the most durable children's books of the century and passed, mostly because it did not resemble anything already selling. A book that fits no category needs only one editor willing to build the category around it, and one is a findable number. Contest judges see the same pattern from the other side: the entries that score highest on creativity are often the ones that would have puzzled a cautious gatekeeper. Writory's monthly contest reads and scores every single entry, which is one way to make sure a strange, good piece is at least never met with silence.
Where to start with her work
Read A Wrinkle in Time first, obviously, and read it as a writer: watch how quickly it establishes Meg's anger and the family's grief, and how the fantastic elements are always anchored to an emotional fact. Then read A Circle of Quiet, the first of the Crosswicks Journals, which is the fullest account of the rejection years and one of the best books about the writing life ever assembled from a working writer's notebooks.
If the theology and craft essays appeal, Walking on Water gathers her thinking about art, faith and discipline. You do not need to share her beliefs to profit from her insistence that showing up to the desk is itself the practice, whatever the market happens to be saying that decade.
What poets can take from this
- Keep a finished manuscript in circulation; a book in a drawer cannot be discovered at a tea party.
- Separate rejections that say badly written from rejections that say does not fit, and only take the first kind to heart.
- Track your submissions in a simple log so a long rejection streak reads as data, not as doom.
- Write the next book while the last one is out on submission; L'Engle never stopped drafting during her worst decade.
- Reread your own journal from a year ago when you feel finished; you will usually find you were composing even while you were quitting.
- Treat a strange premise as a search problem: you are looking for the one editor or contest that wants what does not fit.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in the voice of a manuscript that has just been rejected for the twenty-sixth time and is being slid, once again, into a fresh envelope.
Questions
How many times was A Wrinkle in Time rejected?
Madeleine L'Engle consistently said the novel was rejected by twenty-six publishers over roughly two years before Farrar, Straus accepted it. The figure comes from her own accounts and has been widely repeated in interviews and her memoirs. It was finally published in 1962.
Why was A Wrinkle in Time rejected so many times?
By L'Engle's own telling, publishers found it too dark and too difficult for children, yet clearly not an adult novel, so it fitted no existing category. Science fantasy with a young female protagonist was also an unfamiliar sell in 1960. Nobody seems to have objected to the writing itself.
Did the book succeed once it was published?
Emphatically. It won the Newbery Medal in 1963, the year after publication, has never gone out of print, and has sold millions of copies worldwide. L'Engle went on to write further novels about the same family.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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