News and Stuff:: Cut Pages from A Wrinkle in Time Published in WSJ

I don't know what my childhood would have been like without A Wrinkle in Time. There's a lot of significance placed on that book for me, beyond what's simply in the pages. Talking on the phone with my mother, another L'Engle fan, she told me that some pages that never made it to publication had been uncovered. They were too political.

You can check out the full story and the pages at the Wall Street Journal. To put it simply, these pages show a much more nuanced side of A Wrinkle in Time, one where it wasn't simply a kneejerk reaction to the Red Scare, and one that paints an interesting picture for our modern "security" conscious democracy.

The scene takes place with Meg and her father on Camazotz. She asks him how things could have gotten this way. His response? He starts talking about how too much prosperity can be a dangerous thing as well. That when we become more worried about security than reality, it's just as, if not more, dangerous than totalitarianism.

“This sick longing for security is a dangerous thing, Meg, as insidious as the strontium 90 from our nuclear explosions…”

It's pretty clear why the pages were cut; they contain a lot of references that would have badly dated the book and they're blatantly political. That's not to say that L'Engle didn't have politics in her books. She just usually didn't like to hit people over the head with them. Even if a publisher had agreed to them, I'm not sure she would have wanted to keep them in.