Le Guin, Ursula K.

Le Guin, Ursula K. 1929-

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ursula K. Le Guin is a prolific writer of science fiction, children’s literature, poetry, and a great many essays and nonfiction works. She was born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California, the daughter of anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876–1960), known for his work among Native American tribes, and Theodora Kracaw Kroeber (1897–1979), a psychologist and the author of the best-selling Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (1961). Raised by parents whose professional interests centered on observation and analysis, words, myth, and storytelling, Le Guin developed a fascination with strange worlds and places early on in her life. She submitted her first science fiction piece to Astounding Science Fiction Magazine at age eleven (it was rejected). In 1947 she left California to attend Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she received a B.A. in Romance literature in 1951. She continued her education at Columbia University, where she earned an M.A. and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1952. Sailing to France in 1953, she met the historian Charles Le Guin, whom she married in Paris several months later. The couple have lived for more than fifty years in Portland, Oregon, where they raised their three children.

The ostensible uneventfulness of Le Guin’s life stands in stark contrast to her extraordinary career and the range and variety of her work. With seventeen novels, eleven children’s books, more than a hundred short stories, two collections of essays, five volumes of poetry, and two volumes of translations and screenplays to her name, and having been lavished with numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, the Kafka Prize, and several lifetime achievement awards, she figures as one of the most distinguished writers of her generation. Fighting at the forefront of the civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements of the 1960s, Le Guin first gained fame with her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, an exploration of the effects of sexual identity and (non)gender on an androgynous race in an imaginary country set in the distant future. Both here and in her other science fiction works, such as the award-winning The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), Worlds of Exile and Illusion (1996), and The Telling (2000), Le Guin puts a strong emphasis on the social sciences, especially on sociology and anthropology, using strange, alien cultures to explore and assess aspects of her own culture.

Praised for her ability to invent credible imaginary worlds populated with highly likeable human and nonhuman characters, Le Guin’s work is different from that of other fantasy writers because she is primarily concerned with the human condition. She often uses the alien, non-earthly settings of her stories to present a critical perspective on sociocultural and political issues in our own world, imaginatively exploring new possibilities of living and being in alternative cultures. Politically progressive, witty, and a brilliant stylist, Le Guin has not only gained her reputation as a writer of “speculative fiction”: With her nonfiction works, such as Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (1989) and Steering the Craft (1998), she has also established her name as an incisive social and cultural critic.

SEE ALSO Science Fiction

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cadden, Michael. 2005. Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults. New York: Routledge.

Cummins, Elizabeth. 1993. Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin. Rev. ed. Columbia: South Carolina University Press.

Rochelle, Warren C. 2001. Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press.

Renée C. Hoogland