The world of literature has lost one of its greatest fantasy writers.

Madeleine LÂ’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.

Her works — poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer — were deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.

“Of course I’m Meg,” Ms. L’Engle said about the beloved protagonist of “A Wrinkle in Time.”

I've always hated to see her pegged as a children's writer, for there was so much more to her writing than that. In a sense, L'Engle was the J.K. Rowling of her era, writing books that transcend that category in their sophistication and which earned a following outside the boundaries of "kid lit".

I might have let her death pass unnoted on my site, were it not for my own fleeting contact with Madeleine LÂ’Engle some ten years ago when I was still teaching English. I decided to write to one of my favorite authors, Marion Zimmer Bradley, asking her for advice to give to students about how to write and what it took to write a good story. A few weeks later, I received a pair of big boxes in the school mailroom. Upon opening them up, I discovered that I had been shipped two boxes of MZB's science fiction and fantasy magazine -- and a handwritten note telling me that MZB was unable to personally respond to my request due to a serious illness, but that she wanted me to have a classroom set of these two issues that each had a column on the topics I had asked about. The beautiful note also contained its writer's own answer to those questions. And at the end, I was stunned to see the signature -- Madeleine LÂ’Engle.

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