Favorites Summer 2025: Smithie Icons

A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine Camp Franklin ’41, better known as Madeleine L’Engle, authored more than 60 books during her lifetime, the most famous being A Wrinkle in Time (1962). A Newbery Medal winner, the sci-fi novel has had an enduring presence in popular culture, most recently inspiring a 2018 film adaptation starring Mindy Kaling, Oprah Winfrey, and Reese Witherspoon. “What makes A Wrinkle in Time still so compelling over 50 years after its initial publication is that the narrative isn’t just about [the characters’] struggles … it’s also—and more profoundly—about the struggle against the darkness inside,” the Los Angeles Review of Books wrote in 2018. “L’Engle’s work almost always places its adventures within a larger context of being true to oneself while also being open to others.”

A Little Life

Don’t let its title fool you—A Little Life (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara ’95 is not a little story by any means. Clocking in at more than 830 pages, the novel is only about 100 pages shorter than the latest Merriam-Webster dictionary, but its length hasn’t discouraged millions of readers from buying it, cherishing it, and sharing their takes on it with the world. “The book follows the postgraduate lives of four friends who meet in college and have a heart-wrenching journey toward middle age,” Laura Begley Bloom ’91 wrote for the Spring 2022 Smith Alumnae Quarterly. “It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, became a finalist for the National Book Award, and still evokes outpourings of grief.”

The French Chef

Co-author of the famous 1961 cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia McWilliams Child ’34 achieved solo fame thanks in large part to hosting PBS’s The French Chef. More than 200 episodes of the show were aired, and each week Child would guide viewer—and a live studio audience—in preparing one of her classic recipes, such as duck a l’orange or beef bourguignon. “Julia Child used a variety of methods on her television show to grab and hold her students’ attention,” curator Paula J. Johnson wrote for the National Museum of American History. “High drama and low comedy, sight gags, and the artful use of props—from tickling a live lobster to marking out cuts of meat on her own body—combined to make her cooking lessons memorable as well as fun to watch.”

Ms.

First published in July 1972, Ms. magazine was co-founded by Gloria Steinem ’56 to empower women and report on issues affecting their lives. “Launched during an era when male-run women’s magazines typically focused on topics like getting and keeping a man, beauty regimens, recipes, and parenting, Ms. addressed weighty issues like economic inequality and reproductive rights head-on,” according to History.com. Ms. celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023. The magazine has a long history of running bold, powerful pieces, such as its “No More! Stopping Domestic Violence” cover story (September–October 1994 issue), which listed the names of hundreds of women who were murdered by their male partners.

The Devil’s Arithmetic

Jane Yolen ’60 is the author of hundreds of titles, including Owl Moon (1987) and the How Do Dinosaurs … ? series (2000–present). One of Yolen’s best-known works is The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988), a novel that inspired a 1999 TV movie starring Kirsten Dunst. In her 1988 New York Times review, Cynthia Samuels called The Devil’s Arithmetic a “brave and moving novel,” noting its ambitious use of time travel to help a young student, Hannah, better understand the profound gravity of the Holocaust: “And though heroism is very much a part of the story, it is not the swaggering heroism of rescue and escape but the stoic courage of the condemned as they help one another to end their days with as much dignity as they can muster.”

The Bell Jar

Depression is a common theme in the works of poet Sylvia Plath ’55, whose 1963 death by suicide is still mourned today. (It was one of several documented attempts to take her life.) Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar, was published in England under a pseudonym just weeks before her death. (It was later rereleased under her real name.) It’s seen by many as semiautobiographical, as its lead character grapples with mental health crises similar to those Plath experienced. “[Plath’s] works do not only come to us posthumously. They were written posthumously. Between suicides,” Robert Scholes wrote in 1971 in The New York Times. “She wrote her novel … feverishly, like a person ‘stuck together with glue’ and aware that the glue was melting.”

A Tale for the Time Being

A Smith professor emerita of English language and literature, Ruth Ozeki ’80 is the first practicing Zen Buddhist priest to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize—for her novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013). Her book follows a writer who comes across the diary of a Japanese girl, chronicling her attempts to bond with her centenarian great-grandmother. “This is a book that does not give up its multiple meanings easily, gently but insistently instructing the reader to progress slowly in order to contemplate the porous membrane that separates fact from fiction, self from circumstance, past from present,” Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote in 2013 in The New York Times.

The Baby-Sitters Club

A children’s book series spanning hundreds of titles, The Baby-Sitters Club was created by Ann M. Martin ’77 in 1986. The original books were a hit with readers, and the series grew to include special editions and spinoffs. The Baby-Sitters Club also inspired a 1995 feature film; a 2020 Netflix series; and an ongoing series of graphic novels, the first of which was published in 2006. “I wanted the series to be about babysitting, of course, but especially about how the girls grow, strengthen their friendships, and become problem-solvers and independent thinkers,” Martin told People magazine in 2024.

Time

The director of Below Dreams (2014) and America (2019), filmmaker Garrett Bradley ’07 is also behind the Oscar-nominated documentary Time (2020). It focuses on injustices in the American justice system, tracing a mother’s lengthy, harrowing mission to get her husband freed from prison. As its title suggests, Bradley’s film emphasizes the passage of time, switching between old and modern-day footage to show how much the Richardson family has changed during its patriarch’s incarceration. “The crisp, black-and-white cinematography makes the entire film feel like a poetic ode to perseverance,” Odie Henderson wrote for RogerEbert.com. “The Richardsons will never get the years back that they’ve lost, but we’re left with hope that a triumphant future will stem from their reunion.”

Miss Rumphius

A picture book chronicling one woman’s journey to make the world a little more beautiful, Miss Rumphius (1982) by Barbara Cooney Porter ’38 won a National Book Foundation award shortly after its release and is still lauded today. The book follows the fictional Alice Rumphius, an avid traveler who leaves her lasting imprint on the earth by scattering lupine seeds across the coast of Maine. Rumphius is said to have been modeled after a Smithie and real “lupine lady”: Hilda Edwards Hamlin 1912. According to the New England Historical Society, Hamlin would spend her college summers in Christmas Cove, Maine, where she’d shake cuttings of lupine stalks wherever she went, spreading their seeds to create perennial blooms.

The Feminine Mystique

A co-founder of the National Organization for Women, Betty Goldstein Friedan ’42 was a journalist and women’s rights activist who famously authored The Feminine Mystique (1963). The book centers on American homemakers in the post–World War II world, exploring the notion that a traditional domestic lifestyle isn’t universally satisfying for women. “[Friedan] coined the term ‘feminine mystique’ to describe the societal assumption that women could find fulfillment through housework, marriage, sexual passivity, and child-rearing alone,” according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Friedan further contended that a woman could have a successful career as well as a family.”

Tuck Everlasting

Natalie Moore Babbitt ’54 is the author of such books as The Search for Delicious (1969) and Kneeknock Rise (1970), but her best-known work is Tuck Everlasting (1975). “What if you could live forever?” is the question that appears on some covers of Tuck Everlasting, a children’s book that finds its lead character, Winnie Foster, contemplating whether to join a family she befriends, the Tucks, in immortality. “The Tucks are simple, inconspicuous people who wanted to remain—and who do still manage to remain, one supposes—just as they are,” Philippa Pearce wrote in 1975 in The New York Times. “The story is macabre and moral; exciting and excellently written. It has no absolute end, because time hasn’t.”