I didn't exist in 1962, but I did get to reap some of its literary fruits just over thirty years later. It was the year in which Madeline L'Engle published her classic novel A Wrinkle in Time, a book that would later become one of the first to really warp my head in new ways. That book dug deep at me and probably shaped me in many more ways than most novels I devoured during my admittedly nerdy childhood. It was the first truly dark piece of fiction I remember reading. Some of its imagery still disturbs me now.

A Wrinkle in Time becomes a fascinating work to look back upon when you consider all of its historical and political context. At eight or nine, you don't so much look into the social backdrop of any given book you read. All books are written by people older than you. Most books themselves have existed for longer than you have. They all carry a similar authority. The stories command you of their own accord. They are their own, complete worlds, entirely disconnected from the nuances of the real world you don't fully understand yet.

Re-reading Wrinkle takes a little over an hour for me now. What once stood as an epic--maybe the longest book I'd read at the time, and certainly the most complex--can now be swallowed in one sitting. And what formerly struck me as pure fiction now reveals itself to be very much of its own historical era.

People had a lot to be scared of in 1962. After the second world war, communism became the new evil to fear. Paranoia flooded the American media as politicians masked tension with stilted vernacular and scientists competed in the space race. Patriotism and communism emerged as antithetical forces engaged in constant, invisible conflict. But that tension leaked, as it does, into the art of the time--even into books written for children.

Take a pass through Wrinkle today and you'll find all sorts of Cold War reflections. The villains in the story control and maintain a world where everyone lives in identical conditions--where everyone is exactly the same. The heroes fight this world by asserting human equality over human sameness. They even quote the Declaration of Independence at the story's primary instrument of evil. Strong threads of American patriotism and Christianity run through the book as the forces of good used to fight against atheistic, manufactured societies. It's a staunchly political work even if its readers don't realize it until they acquire a more developed sense of history later in life. That's not to say it's a book that can be reduced to the politics of the era. It's still a gem of a children's novel, a staggeringly poetic work that remains relevant even now. But it certainly stands as a relic of a distant period of American history.