Ursula K. Le Guin

An American novelist of imagined worlds

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, on October 21, 1929, and died on January 22, 2018. She was an American author whose career began with publication in 1959 and lasted nearly sixty years. Though she was often described as a science fiction writer, and wrote some of the most influential speculative fiction of her era, Le Guin said she preferred to be known as an “American novelist.” Her body of work was large and varied: more than twenty novels, more than a hundred short stories, poetry, literary criticism, translations, children’s books, and anthologies.

Le Guin is best known for the science fiction works set in her Hainish universe and for the Earthsea fantasy series. She reached wide critical and commercial success with A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968 and The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, books Harold Bloom described as her masterpieces. For The Left Hand of Darkness, she won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, becoming the first woman to win both for the same book. Later works continued in Earthsea and the Hainish universe, while others were set in the fictional country of Orsinia or written for children.

What shaped her imagination

Le Guin grew up in a household rich in books, scholarship, and stories. Her father, Alfred Louis Kroeber, was an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and her mother, Theodora Kroeber, later became an author. Visitors to the family included well-known academics such as Robert Oppenheimer, whom Le Guin later used as a model for Shevek in The Dispossessed. As a child she read science fiction magazines with her siblings, loved myths and legends, especially Norse mythology, and listened to Native American legends told by her father.

Her education also shaped her range. She studied Renaissance French and Italian literature at Radcliffe College, graduating in 1951, then earned a master’s degree in French from Columbia University in 1952. She began doctoral work and won a Fulbright grant for study in France, but after marrying historian Charles Le Guin in Paris in 1953, she left the doctorate behind. She taught French, worked as a secretary, raised three children, and continued writing. The family settled in Portland, Oregon, in 1959 and remained there.

Cultural anthropology, Taoism, feminism, and the writings of Carl Jung all strongly influenced Le Guin’s work. Her fiction often used anthropologists or cultural observers as protagonists, and Taoist ideas of balance and equilibrium appear in several writings. She questioned familiar patterns in speculative fiction, including through dark-skinned protagonists in Earthsea and experimental structure in Always Coming Home. Her stories took on race, gender, sexuality, coming of age, and alternative political structures, as in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and The Dispossessed.

Le Guin received eight Hugo Awards, six Nebula Awards, and twenty-five Locus Awards. In 2000, the U.S. Library of Congress named her a Living Legend; in 2003, she became the second woman named a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; and in 2014, she received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Her work influenced writers including Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, and Iain Banks. Her words still carry because they ask direct, searching questions about how people live, what they owe one another, and what other kinds of worlds might be possible.