The Door in the Wall

The Door in the Wall is a children's novel by the American writer and illustrator Marguerite de Angeli, published in 1949. It received the Newbery Medal in 1950.

The story is set in England during the Middle Ages, as the Black Death moves through the country. Robin, the son of a knight who is away fighting, is expecting to be sent for training as a page when he loses the use of his legs, and the household that should have taken him in has been emptied by the plague. He is taken up by a friar, Brother Luke, who teaches him to read and to carve wood and to swim, and who keeps telling him that the way past a wall is a door rather than a battering ram. The novel follows Robin from a castle under siege to the household of a lord who needs a man who can be useful with his hands, and it lets the boy's disability shape the story rather than serving as a lesson for other people.

De Angeli wrote and illustrated the book herself, and it is one of a series of historical stories she made for children, all of them set in places she had researched on the ground.