If you’ve read A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle’s 1961 sci-fi children’s classic, you’ve met Charles Wallace, one of fiction’s great perfect babies. At five years old, he’s not exactly tongue-tied (“Let’s be exclusive…that’s my new word for the day. Impressive, isn’t it?”); he’s also psychic, eerily clairvoyant when it comes to anticipating his family’s […]

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Fictional genius kids used to be realistically frumpy for the most part. A Wrinkle in Time’s Meg and Charles Wallace were not fashion plates. When we first meet Esme of J.D. Salinger’s For Esme—With Love and Squalor, she is wet and ratlike. Here, to take another instance, is the original 1976 cover of Very Far […]

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