Ursula K. Le Guin

Biography

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929-2018) was the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, one of the founders of American anthropology, and Theodora Kroeber, author of 'Ishi in Two Worlds' — the story of the last surviving member of the Yahi people of California. Le Guin grew up in a household where cultural relativism was the air she breathed: no civilization was inherently superior, no worldview inherently correct. She studied French and Italian literature at Radcliffe and Columbia, married the historian Charles Le Guin, and began writing science fiction and fantasy in the early 1960s. She was deeply read in Taoism, having co-translated the Tao Te Ching, and her fiction consistently reflects Taoist principles of balance, non-action, and the interdependence of opposites. She wrote A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968, making its protagonist brown-skinned in a genre that assumed white heroes — a choice so quiet and so radical that many readers and all film adaptors ignored it for decades.

Ursula K. Le Guin at a glance