Ursula K. Le Guin

Her father ran Berkeley's anthropology museum. Her mother took a graduate degree in psychology, turned to writing in her 60s, and produced Ishi in Two Worlds, about the last known Yahi man, whom Alfred Kroeber had studied and whose people had been killed off around him. There were three older brothers, a large library, summers in the Napa Valley, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Norse myth and the Native American stories her father told. Oppenheimer came to the house and became the model for Shevek in The Dispossessed. She wrote a story at nine and mailed one to Astounding at 11. It came back, and she sent nothing out for ten years. Radcliffe, a Columbia master's in French, then a Fulbright crossing on which she met Charles Le Guin.

She wrote five novels between 1951 and 1961 set in an invented central European country called Orsinia, and publishers turned down all of them. A poem appeared in 1959, a story in 1961, her first science fiction in 1962, her first novel in 1966. Then A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968 and The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, which took the Hugo and the Nebula and made her the first woman to win both for one book. The Farthest Shore took the National Book Award in 1973 and The Dispossessed took the Hugo and Nebula again in 1975. The Lathe of Heaven, Always Coming Home, eleven picture books, Tehanu, a Tao Te Ching, Lavinia. Nearly 60 years of it, in more than 40 languages, with eight Hugos, six Nebulas and 25 Locus awards.

She kept publicly correcting her own books. The Left Hand of Darkness was attacked for giving its ambisexual Gethenians masculine pronouns, for putting none of them in a stereotypically female role, and for treating heterosexuality as the norm. In an essay in 1976 she answered that gender was secondary to loyalty. In 1988 she went back to the essay, conceded that gender was central, and apologised for the heterosexuality. She then wrote Gethenians as she, in a 1995 story and in a reprint of an old one, and said The Eye of the Heron was the first book she had genuinely centred on a woman. When Playboy asked in 1968 to print a story as by U. K. Le Guin she agreed, and wrote later that it seemed so grotesque she failed to see that it also mattered.

She had made the Earthsea protagonists dark-skinned on purpose: most people in the world are not white, she said in 2001, so why assume the future would be. The 2004 Sci Fi Channel adaptation cast them white. Her contract gave her the standard status of consultant, which meant nothing. She answered in Slate that December with A Whitewashed Earthsea and in Locus with Frankenstein's Earthsea. She quit the Authors Guild in 2009 over the Google settlement, telling it it had decided to deal with the devil. Taking the National Book Foundation medal in 2014 she said the power of capitalism seems inescapable, and so did the divine right of kings. She died at home in Portland on January 22, 2018.

Ursula K. Le Guin's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Wizard of Earthsea book
  Written for young adults, with a dark-skinned hero on purpose 1968
• The Left Hand of Darkness book
  The first novel by a woman to take both the Hugo and the Nebula 1969
• The Lathe of Heaven book
  Her homage to Philip K. Dick, who had been at her high school 1971
• The Dispossessed book
  Hugo and Nebula again. Shevek was modelled on Oppenheimer 1974
• Always Coming Home book
  Poems, drawings and fake ethnography from a future Napa Valley 1985
• Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching book
  A rendition she worked at across most of her adult life 1997

• c. 1941 aged ~12 Mails a story to Astounding Science Fiction at 11 and is rejected She sent nothing else out for ten years.
• December 1953 aged 24 Marries the historian Charles Le Guin in Paris They had met that year aboard the Queen Mary. The marriage, she said, was the end of the doctorate.
• 1959 aged ~30 Moves to Portland and publishes her first poem
• 1966 aged ~37 Publishes Rocannon's World, her first novel, after five rejected ones
• 1969 aged ~40 The Left Hand of Darkness takes both the Hugo and the Nebula
• 1974 aged ~45 Publishes The Dispossessed
• December 16, 2004 aged 75 Publishes A Whitewashed Earthsea in Slate
• December 2009 aged 80 Resigns from the Authors Guild over the Google settlement
• January 22, 2018 aged 88 Dies at home in Portland at 88

• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. the model for Shevek
• Franz Boas 1858–1942
  Founded American academic anthropology and argued against racial determinism from Columbia University. taught her father
• Margaret Mead 1901–1978
  Cultural anthropologist whose studies of Pacific Island societies shaped 20th-century social science. the discipline her fiction ran on
• Octavia E. Butler 1947–2006
  Science-fiction author whose explorations of race, gender, hierarchy, and survival became foundational to Afrofuturism. took the argument further
• Isaac Asimov 1920–1992
  Writer whose science fiction and popular science helped shape public imagination about robots, technology, and the future. the genre she was measured against