Your speculations about what "would have been" – book burnings! imprisonment! – are ahistoric to the point of paranoid nuttyness. The specific passages left ou

Your speculations about what "would have been" – book burnings! imprisonment! – are ahistoric to the point of paranoid nuttyness. The specific passages left out were a few slight intensifications of one theme. Leaving them out didn't 'obfuscate' anything. As the literary critics consulted by the WSJ suggest, the cuts arguably improved the book's narrative flow and timelessness. Also note that by 1962, when Wrinkle in Time was published, the country was already 8 years past the peak of McCarthyism, with McCarthy discredited and dead. Even at the height of McCarthy's investigations, in the early 50s, the only metaphorical "book burning" that happened was the State Department pulling some books from its overseas outreach libraries. That's an embarrassment, of course, but not the kind of persecution you're implying that L'Engle would've faced. For cultural context, The Twilight Zone's original TV run was 1959-1964. It often featured the exact same kind of allegorical criticism of conformity and paranoia. A few extra words in Wrinkle in Time – about how even in democracies, "the sick longing for security is a dangerous thing" – would've been zero risk to the book's popularity or author.