Ursula K. Le Guin was born Ursula Kroeber in 1929 in Berkeley, California. Her father was the eminent anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (1897–1960), whose extensive and pioneering work on Native American tribes helped establish one of the leading US anthropology departments at the University of California at Berkley. Her mother, Theodora Kracaw Kroeber Quinn (1897–1979), was a writer and scholar in her own right, known for the best selling Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (1961). As a child, Le Guin read avidly, especially in myth and science-fiction, the latter possibly an influence of her older brothers’ interests. She started writing very young, submitting her first story for publication (albeit unsuccessfully) to the science fiction magazine Astounding Stories at the age of eleven. Le Guin also read, and acknowledges as influential, “mainstream” literature figures such as Shelley, Wordsworth and Keats, as well as the writings of the Brontes, Dickens, Tolstoy, Woolf, Forster and others.
Le Guin acquired a BA from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1951 and an MA from Columbia University in 1952. She started doctoral work in French and Renaissance Literature soon after, which she did not complete. On a Fulbright visit to Paris in 1953 she met and shortly after married the historian Charles A. Le Guin. From 1954 onwards, after the couple returned to the US, Le Guin taught French in different Universities, and in 1959, after having given birth to her two daughters, the family settled in Portland, Oregon, where the Le Guins have lived ever since. Le Guin’s only son and last child was born a few years later.
Although Ursula K. Le Guin is best known for her fantasy and science fiction work, she can be better understood as a “crossover” writer, since she has produced work in many different genres (science fiction, fantasy, “realism”, speculative fiction) and forms (novels, short stories, poetry). Her first published work was the short story “April in Paris”, a time travel fantasy, published in 1962 in the magazine Fantastic. A series of short stories published in magazines followed, both in the science fiction and the fantasy genre, which set a lot of the themes and concerns that would recur in her later work. A series of three novels, Planet of Exile (1966), Rocannon’s World (1966) and City of Illusions (1967) introduced the Hainish universe, which Le Guin invented to explore her ideas about society. These novels seem to mix “hard” science and mythological elements, which make them, for many critics, a somewhat awkward mix of science fiction and fantasy.
Le Guin reached a new level of maturity in her writing in the late 1960s. Having been asked by Herman Schein of Parnassus Press to write a book addressing an 11-17 year old readership, she produced the first of a series of books set in the fantasy world of Earthsea, an archipelago of islands, titled A Wizard of Earthsea (1968). The following year saw the publication of one of her most celebrated novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, focusing on the “androgynous” people of the planet Gethen. Asexual most days of the month, the Gethenians can chose either sex temporarily in their phase of ‘Kemmer’. This novel won Le Guin both the 1969 Nebula and the 1970 Hugo awards, both highly esteemed distinctions in the science fiction genre. The publication of these two novels was instrumental in Le Guin’s development as a writer. As she has noted:
Along in 1967–68 I finally got my pure fantasy vein separated off from my science fiction vein by writing A Wizard of Earthsea and then The Left Hand of Darkness, and the separation marked a very large advance in both skill and content. (Le Guin 1979: 29-30).
Indeed, her subsequent works sit much more comfortably within the fantasy or science fiction genres. The Earthsea fantasy world was expanded and further explored with the publication of The Tombs of Atuan in 1970 and The Farthest Shore in 1972, while more novels and short stories set in the Hainish universe followed, most notably The Dispossessed (1974), which won again both the Nebula and Hugo awards.
The Earthsea books form a coherent whole, as they follow the lives of Ged, a young boy who trains to be a wizard and learns to control his power in A Wizard of Earthsea, and Tenar, a young girl who must find her own identity in The Tombs of Atuan. In The Farthest Shore, Ged and the young prince Arran travel to the land of the dead to heal Earthsea, while in Le Guin’s last two Earthsea novels, Tehanu (1990) and The Other Wind (2001) we see Ged and Tenar middle-aged, and the cycle comes to a natural conclusion. The intermittent Tales from Earthsea (2001) contains a collection of short stories which span many years in Earthsea and often fill gaps in the history of this invented world. On the contrary, Le Guin’s science fiction novels often described as taking place in the Hainish universe, or the Ekumen world, were never envisioned as a “series” of books set in a consistent and coherent invented universe. Le Guin has maintained that it is not possible to talk about “the Hainish or Ekumen cycle or saga”. In a recent interview for the science fiction magazine Death Ray she stated:
I didn’t set out to write a series, exactly… It just grew, like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I found it a lot easier to keep going back to the same universe than to keep making up new ones. Ask God – God probably doesn’t forget what he did with various places and peoples, though. I do. So people who try to make a grand history out of the Hainish books are doomed to extreme frustration – they find whole millennia missing, two planets with the same name – Werel – that aren’t the same planet – a universe of boo-boos. It’s such a mess you’d think Coyote [the Native American Trickster god] made it. Like this one. (Le Guin 2007: 82)
For Le Guin, her science fiction novels are more about exploring different experiments in human psychology and society than constructing a coherent world and mythology. Her focus on “soft” science fiction (as opposed to “hard” science fiction, which puts technology in the foreground) has proved an excellent tool to explore utopias and dystopias, often polemical and subtly didactical. Her much-anthologized short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) presents a city in which the blissful happiness of the inhabitants rests solely on the abuse and misery of a single child. Her novella The Word for World Is Forest (which first appeared in Harlan Ellison’s anthology Again, Dangerous Visions of 1972 and was later published independently) was very much influenced by the Vietnam War and can be read as a powerful allegory against colonial exploitation.
Le Guin’s fiction seems to move within a number of different subjects and concerns. Cultural anthropology, the scholarly expertise of her parents, has found its way into both her science fiction and fantasy works. Both her Earthsea novels and her science fiction stories set in the Hainish or Ekumen world show a consistent attention to the way that different cultures operate, co-exist, and – occasionally – clash. Especially in her Earthsea books, issues of race and colour are central. Contrary to the mainstream of fantasy tradition, the wizard Ged, whose life is followed in almost all Earthsea stories, is brown-skinned. In Le Guin’s words:
My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now – why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?
The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from Northern Europe, which is why it was about white people. I’m white, but not European. My people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for “young adults”) might not identify straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees—hoping that the reader would get “into Ged’s skin” and only then discover it wasn’t a white one. (Le Guin 2004)
The same “color scheme” seems to be at work in her science fiction novels, like The Left Hand of Darkness, in which the only character from Earth is a black man, and everybody else in the book is “Inuit (or Tibetan) brown”.
Other ideas that recur in Le Guin’s work come from Taoist philosophy. Her father admired the Tao Te Ching, a book containing the essentials of Taoist beliefs, and Le Guin studied it and worked on her own personal and poetic translation of this text for forty years before she published it as Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book About The Way And The Power Of The Way in 1997. Her Earthsea books betray the influence of Taoist concepts as the notion of “the Equilibrium” is central to this fantasy world. The wizard Ged, and other characters in the Earthsea books, learn to avoid the use of magic unless absolutely necessary, as every spell can produce endless waves of unknown consequences. The ying-yang symbol of Taoism demonstrates the need for a careful balance between light and darkness: the same emblem is used by the Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness as a metaphor for the balance and inter-dependence between male and female.
Another major concern of Le Guin’s fiction, entering her writing relatively late, is feminism. Her exploration of the social construction of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness and the character of Tenar in The Tombs of Atuan already show a strong interest in gender roles and prejudices, but from the mid-1980s onwards her writing has become much more self-consciously feminist. Her 1985 novel Always Coming Home is a feminist utopia, while Le Guin’s feminist revisiting of the Earthsea universe in the 1990s produced Tehanu, in which she tried to redress the flaws in the male-oriented culture of her earlier Earthsea books.
Ursula Le Guin has been a prolific writer whose work is difficult to introduce and summarize in one single article. A “short bibliography” in her official website (see web resources) which includes “major works only, principal U.S. editions only” lists seven novels of the Ekumen, six Earthsea books, ten other novels, ten short story collections, seven books of poetry, four works of translation and another four of literary criticism, twelve books for children (including the four books of the popular Catwing series), four edited anthologies, one screenplay, and eight chapbooks. She has won multiple Nebula and Hugo awards, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Harold Vursell Award, a National Book Award, and she has been short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Approaching her eightieth year of age, Le Guin is still very much an active writer. Her latest novel, Lavinia (2008), tells the story of the homonymous heroine, which was left untold in Vergil’s epic poem The Aeneid, and has been hailed as a masterpiece.
Perhaps one of the most important elements that has distinguished Le Guin’s writing is her attention to the use of language and style. Her sentences are beautifully crafted and have the power to surprise and create new images and ways of expressing common feelings and thoughts. The quality of writing is often, for critics, what distinguishes “serious literature” from “genre”. Nevertheless, Le Guin’s choice to write within the “popular” genres of science fiction and fantasy has been conscious and defiant, despite the fact that this choice might have cost her in more general recognition, at least in her early career. She recently answered the question of why she writes so little “contemporary fiction” by saying: “You mean realism? Oh, I suppose because, all through the 20th century, realism was what you were supposed to write, and I never have liked being told what to do” (Le Guin 2007: 79).
Her defense of “genre” writing has found expression in her hilarious and highly ironic short piece “On Serious Literature: The Return of the Genre-Zombie”, available online on her official website (see web resources).
Works Cited
Le Guin, Ursula K. (1979), The Language of the Night: Essays
on Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited and introduced by Susan
Wood (Hastings on Hudson, NY: Ultramarine Publishing)
Le Guin, Ursula K. (2004): “A Whitewashed Earthsea: How the Sci Fi
Channel wrecked my books”, slate.com, Dec. 16, 2004. (see
web resources)
Le Guin, Ursula (2007): “The Death Ray Interview with Ursula K. Le
Guin”, Death Ray, 5, October 2007: 77-82 (see web
resources)
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Citation: Fimi, Dimitra. "Ursula Le Guin". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 November 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5219, accessed 16 October 2024.]
