This moving memoir by Madeleine L'Engle documents a marriage of more than forty years between two gifted people, a marriage that was "full of wonderful things, joyous things, grievous things, but ours." Hugh Franklin was a successful stage actor from Oklahoma when he met Madeleine L'Engle, a New Yorker who had written her first novel and was acting in small parts. She gives a charming account of their courtship during Eva Le Gallienne's The Cherry Orchard and their marriage during Ethel Barrymore's The Joyous Season. The demands of their separate careers, hers as a writer and Hugh's as an actor, raised special problems which they had to surmount to maintain the kind of family life—marital and filial love, children and grandchildren—which they wanted.

Their setting was Crosswicks, an eighteenth-century Connecticut farmhouse which in their first year together they acquired for $6,300—almost more than they could then manage. An icon of their marriage, Crosswicks was rebuilt and expanded over the years as their individual careers flourished and their family grew. After she and Hugh learned their mistake in trying to run a general store in their neighborhood, they found a rent- controlled apartment in New York for their second home. Hugh got a fat part in Heartbreak House and Madeleine's A Wrinkle in Time, after many rejections, won the prestigious Newbery Prize and became a best-seller. Then Hugh became nationally famous as Dr. Charles Tyler in the long-running television serial All My Children.

The tragic news of Hugh's cancer in the summer of 1987 is introduced early in the main narrative, and the reader shares in the fears, hopes, frustrations, and near-despair as the story unfolds. Two-Part Invention is not only the story of the marriage of true minds and spirits, it is a brilliant writer's tribute to, and record of, a lasting love. 

From the dustjacket