Never Giving Up

In Circle of Quiet, Madeleine L’Engle describes how her young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time was dismissed by eight publishers before it eventually landed with the publishing house of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. For L’Engle, the decade of her thirties was set on the spin cycle of rejection.

On her fortieth birthday, her husband called L’Engle in her writing studio to say that another rejection letter had come from yet another publisher. In a fit of melancholic despair, L’Engle shrouded her typewriter with a sheet. She…