(With Biography and Some Contexts) 1
<1862-90 US military leads warfare against various Native American tribes, nations, and confederations as White settlers move West; the Indians lose, including massacres and cultural genocide among the Indians of California.
<1916 Death of "Ishi," the last Yahi Indian in California, who had been aided, befriended, and studied by Le Guin's father, A. L. Kroeber>
<1917-19 A. L. Kroeber finishes monumental Handbook of the Indians of California.>
<1926 Theodora Kracaw Brown, mother of Clifton and Theodore, marries Alfred Louis Kroeber.>
1929 Ursula born at Berkeley, CA, to Theodora and A. L. Kroeber, youngest of four children and only daughter (a couple years younger than Karl, her full sibling).
<1937-48 Golden age of 20th-c. Existentialism.
ca. 1938 At about age 12, Ursula discovers Lord Dunsany's A Dreamer's Tales and discovers her "native country" (Le Guin, "Citizen of Mondath").
<1939-45 After preliminaries, World War II begins in deadly earnest. US formally enters after attack on Pearl Harbor (7 Dec. 1941).>
1947-51 Ursula Kroeber attends Radcliffe College majoring in French and Italian, with a concentration in Renaissance literature; graduates Phi Beta Kappa not long after having an unplanned pregnancy and an abortion.
[1948 A. L. Kroeber publishes revised 2nd edn. of Anthropology (1st edn. 1923), reissued in parts in the early 1960s.]
<1950-53 The Korean Conflict. / Rise of Joseph McCarthy and the power of a Red Scare silencing much unorthodox thought in the USA into the 1960s.>
1951 Ursula writes Radcliffe senior thesis: "The Metaphor of the Rose as an Illustration of the 'Carpe Diem' Theme in French and Italian Poetry of the Renaissance."
1952 Receives M.A. from Columbia University, French specialization with thesis on "Ideas of Death in Ronsard's Poetry."
1953 Travels to France on a Fulbright grant for research for Ph.D., meeting at sea the historian Charles Le Guin; they marry in Paris.
1954 Charles teaches history at Mercer University in Macon, GA; Ursula teaches French.
<French forces at Dienbienphu surrender to Vietminh in Indochina, giving the nationalist/Communist forces following Ho Chi Minh victory in the First War for Vietnamese Independence.
<Segregation by law forbidden by the US Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.>
1955 Writes parents of her interest in Daoism on feminine yin and masculine yang (28 Oct., reported in Barrow & Barrow 86)
<Ngo Dinh Diem refuses to hold elections and declares the Republic of Viet Nam in the south of old French Indochina.
<Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to move to segregated section in a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.>
1956 Charles teaches history at the University of Idaho in Moscow, ID; Ursula teaches French.
1957 Daughter Elizabeth born.
1959 Le Guins move to Portland, OR; Charles teaches history at Portland State University; daughter Caroline born.
[Ursula Le Guin's mother, Theodora Kroeber, publishes The Inland Whale, nine stories from native American cultures in California, each giving a portrait of a woman.]
1960 Le Guin's "Coming of age . . . at about age thirty-one" (LoN 55). / Le Guin reintroduced to S.F. / Death of A. L. Kroeber in Paris.
<National Liberation Front (NLF) established in South Vietnam; Pres. John F. Kennedy increases US aid for South Vietnam and sends additional military advisers.
<Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and others launch southern sit-in movement.>
1961 "An die Musik" (an Orsinian tale) published in Western Humanities Review.
[T. Kroeber publishes Ishi in Two Worlds. ]
<Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sends "Freedom Riders" into US South to resist segregation laws in interstate transportation.>
1962 "April in Paris" (SF) published in Fantastic 11.
<Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) national convention in Port Huron, MI, issues "The Port Huron Statement" calling for radical change in America, aiming at "participatory democracy" rise of the "New" Left.
1963 "The Masters" and "Darkness Box" (S.F./SF) published in Fantastic 12. Le Guin writing Planet of Exile.
<August: march on Washington, DC., featuring M. L. King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech" climax of civil rights movement. / November: Assassination of John F. Kennedy.>
1964 "The Word of Unbinding" and "The Rule of Names" published in Fantastic 13 (Earthsea tales); "The Dowry of Angyar" published in Amazing; son Theodore born.
[T. Kroeber publishes Ishi: Last of His Tribe, story of Ishi's life and world. / Rise of UK magazine New Worlds, providing an outlet for serious S.F. experimentation with themes and writing styles.]
<1964 Civil Rights Act makes illegal discrimination based on race and other listed reasons, including sex. / Three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi. / Riots in Harlem and elsewhere. / L. Johnson elected President of the United States, on a peace platform. / Free speech movement starts at U. of California at Berkeley.
"All through the sixties, in my home city in the States, I had been helping organize and participating in nonviolent demonstrations, first against atomic bomb testing, then against the pursuance of the war in Viet Nam. . . . Anyway, there was a peace movement, and I was in it, and so had a channel of action and expression for my ethical and political opinions totally separate from my writing" (Le Guin, LoN [1979]: 151).
<1965 First US combat troops at Danang, Vietnam, rising to 200,000 by December. B-52s bomb North Vietnam. First march against the war in Vietnam.>
1966 Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile (Ace doubles).
<Founding of the National Organization for Women. / At a conference on Structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, Jacques Derrida delivers a paper on "Structure, Sign and Play . . . ," laying a philosophical groundwork for a very strong theory of what Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann would call in their book that year, The Social Construction of Reality.>
1967 City of Illusions (Ace single).
1968 Le Guin in London and feels she should not participate there in anti-US demonstrations; writes Word for World . . . . / A Wizard of Earthsea
[No More Fun and Games begins publication: "one of the very earliest radical feminist journals (Echols 158-65). / Joanna Russ publishes Picnic on Paradise an early tale of Alyx, a strong feminist hero(ine). / Film and novel of 2001: the ultimate male "trip."]
<Battle of Khesanh and Tet Offensive in Vietnam. American troops massacre men, women, children, and babies at My Lai. / Students riot in Paris: France appears close to a revolution.>
<Assassinations of Robert Kennedy and M. L. King, Jr.; King assassination followed by rioting. / Televised police riot at Democratic National convention in Chicago. / R. M. Nixon elected US President, beginning of "backlash" against political radicalism.
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness (wins both Nebula and Hugo Awards), "Winter's King" (Orbit 5, ed. Damon Knight), [coll. 1975 in The Wind's Twelve Quarter, with feminine pronouns]), "Nine Lives" (Playboy, but under the name "U. K. Le Guin" hiding her gender and with some unapproved changes). Receives Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for A Wizard of Earthsea.
<US bombs North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia. First and second withdrawals of US troops announced by Nixon. US bombs Hanoi and Haiphong. Successful "Moratoriums" protest against the war.
<Ca. 300 Weathermen attempt to "bring the war home" battling police in Chicago. / Fred Hampton and Mark Clark of the Black Panther Party killed in raid by Chicago police. / Increasing feeling among some politically active women that feminism and the left are opposed (Echols 134). / Last week of June: Stonewall Rebellion and "Gay Pride Week" riot and aftermath when gay men resist raid on The Stonewall Bar in Greenwich Village, NYC.>
1970 "A Trip to the Head (Quark 1, ed. S. R. Delany), "The Tombs of Atuan" (short form in Worlds of Fantasy 1). Wins both Hugo and Nebula Awards (SF fans and authors) for The Left Hand of Darkness.
[Publication of T. Kroeber's Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration; J. Russ's scholarly work, "The Image of Women in Science Fiction"; Gloria Steinem's liberal feminist essay, "What It Would Be Like If Women Win," Time, 31 Aug.; Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, and Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood is Powerful best selling, ovular works for radical feminism (Echols 198-99).
<Spring: US invades neutral Cambodia, bombs North Vietnam; Ohio National Guard shoots into gathered students at Kent State U., 4 killed; police open fire at Jackson State College, 2 killed. / First Earth Day.>
1971 The Tombs of Atuan (Atheneum, Gollancz to Bantam), The Lathe of Heaven (Scribner's, Gollancz, to Avon for paperback) / "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" in New Dimensions 1, ed. Robert Silverberg..
<Major antiwar demonstrations in Washington, DC. in April (peaceful) and May (not peaceful). / Proceedings of the second Congress to Unite Women pre-empted by group insisting the women's movement accept lesbianism and value, as phrased in the title of the Radicalesbian{sic} position paper, "The Woman-Identified Woman.">
1972 "The Word for World Is Forest" (in H. Ellison, ed., Again, Dangerous Visions, wins Hugo Award for novella), and The Word for World Is Forest (novel format), The Farthest Shore. Newbery Silver Medal Award for The Tombs of Atuan. National Book Award for Children's Books for The Farthest Shore.
[Start of Ms. magazine: liberal feminist publication (Echols 199). / Joanna Russ's "When It Changed," featuring Whileaway, a feminist separatist utopia.]
<Last US ground troops leave Vietnam. Preliminary peace agreement in Vietnam. The "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi and Haiphong. R. M. Nixon runs against G. McGovern in what many see as a referendum on the 1960s; Nixon wins in a landslide.>
1973 "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas . . ." (New Dimensions III, ed. R. Silverberg; by 1981 frequently anthologized. Hugo Award for The Word for World Is Forest. Locus Award for The Lathe of Heaven.
[Alice Sheldon ("James Tiptree, Jr.") publishes "The Women Men Don't See," separatist feminist fiction; Mary Daly publishes Beyond God the Father, endorsing separatism in a woman's counterculture (Echols 5).]
1974 "Schrödinger's Cat" (Universe 5, ed. Terry Garr), The Dispossessed (wins both Nebula and Hugo Awards), "The Day Before the Revolution" (wins Nebula Award, rpt. Bitches and Sad Ladies, ed. Pat Rotter, Nebula Award Stories 10, ed. J. Gunn, More Women of Wonder, ed. Pamela Sargent). Hugo Award for ". . . Omelas."
[Pamela Sargent publishes first of her anthologies of S.F. by women, Women of Wonder; Suzy McKee Charnas publishes Walk to the End of the World: male-domination dystopia.]
<Nixon resigns. Peace agreement signed in Paris, POWs returned, last US forces leave South Vietnam; US stops bombing in SE. Asia.>
1975 "The New Atlantis" (rpt. by 1978 in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, regular and "Shorter" edn.) Le Guin wins Nebula and Hugo Awards for The Dispossessed, the Nebula and Jupiter Awards for "The Day Before the Revolution." / Wild Angels: Le Guin's first coll. of her poems. / Special Le Guin issue of Science-Fiction Studies.
[Joanna Russ publishes The Female Man, whose utopian ideal is Whileaway.]
<Saigon surrenders to North Vietnamese, for the end of the Second War for Vietnamese Independence. / Khmer Rouge take over in Cambodia and begin the time of "the killing fields.">
1976 Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (Young Adult novel: male protagonist-narrator), Solomon Leviathan's Nine Hundred and Thirty-First Trip Around the World (picture book illustrated by Alicia Austin), Orsinian Tales (coll. of 11 stories, including "An de Musik"). Jupiter Award for "The Diary of the Rose."
[Samuel R. Delany publishes Triton, a utopia, dystopia, and "heterotopia" with radical differences in how various people live. / Vonda N. McIntyre and Susan Janice Anderson, eds., Aurora: Beyond Equality, anthology of nonsexist S.F., plus Le Guin's essay "Is Gender Necessary" (on LHD).]
<Bicentennial of American Revolution.>
[1977 Alice Sheldon (writing as Rocconna Sheldon) publishes "The Screwfly Solution," a story premised on the intertwining, down to the neural level, of male aggression and male sexuality.]
1978 "The Eye of the Heron" (Millennial Women, ed. Virginia Kidd): Le Guin's male hero killed, women central to conclusion of story.
[Publication of Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism a strong statement of what A. Echols calls cultural feminism. Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines published: slightly ambiguous feminist separatist utopia, sequel to Walk to the End of the World.]
1979 Leese Webster (children's book), Malafrena (set in Orsinia), "Pathways of Desire" in New Dimensions 9. Le Guin is the invited respondent for a very high-powered international symposium on narrative at the University of Chicago. Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for A Wizard of Earthsea; Gandalf Award (Grand Master of Fantasy). Original edn. of Language of the Night published: coll. essays. / Death of Theodora Kroeber.
[T. Kroeber and Robert F. Heizer, eds., Ishi the Last Yahi . . . .]
1980 The Beginning Place (Young Adult novel: narration divided between points of view of a young man and a young woman). / Special Le Guin issue of Extrapolation.
<Ronald Reagan elected Pres., starting at least 12 years of "New Right" rule.>
1981 Hard Words (new poems by Le Guin, several with Hindu and feminist themes).
1982 The Compass Rose, coll. stories from 1974 through 1982.
1983 "The Ascent of the North Face" in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.
1984 Locus Award for The Compass Road collection.
1985 Always Coming Home (a "future anthropology" containing a novel), audio cassette: Music and Poetry of the Kesh, composer, Todd Barton (released with ACH). Libretto for Rigel Nine: An Opera, music by David Bedford.
Le Guin on lecture circuit with presentation on "A Woman Writing."
1986 Continuing travel with "A Woman Writing." Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction for Always Coming Home.
1987 Buffalo Gals And Other Animal Presences (coll. stories from the 1970s and 1980s), "Is Gender Necessary? Redux": original essay from 1976 (q.v.), with commentary and corrections. Prix Lectures-Jeunesse for Very Far Away from Anywhere Else.
1988 Wild Oats and Fireweed (new poems), Catwings (picture book illustrated by S. D. Schindler), A Visit from Dr. Katz (picture book illustrated by Ann Barrow). Publ. of "Legends for a New Land": Guest of Honor Speech at 19th Annual Mythopoeic Conference.
1989 Catwings Return (picture book illustrated by S. D. Schindler), Fire and Stone (picture book illustrated by Laura Marshall), Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (important coll. of essays from 1976-1988). / Reissue of Language of the Night (with expansions). / Le Guin Receives the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association. International Fantasy Award and Hugh Award for "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight."
<US troops invade Panama.>
1990 "The Kerastion" appears in Westercon 1990 Program Book. "The Shobies' Story" in Universe. Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (wins Nebula for best novel). Blood Lodge Dances dance: choreography by Judy Patton, design by Christine Bourdette.
<US troops sent as largest contingent facing off against Iraq: Operation Desert Shield, followed by Operation Desert Storm: war against Iraq resulting in heavy Iraqi casualties.>
1991 "The First Contact with the Gorgonids" in Omni; "Newton's Sleep" in Full Spectrum 3. Searoad (connected "mundane" short stories). Pushcart Prize for "Bill Weisler" (coll. Searoad). Harold Vursell Award, American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters.
1992 "The Rock that Changed Things" in Amazing. Stone Dances dance: choreography by Judy Patton, design by Christine Bourdette. H. L. Davis Award from Oregon Institute of Literary Arts for Searoad.
1993 "Dancing to Ganam" in Amazing. Publication of The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990, ed. Le Guin and Brian Attebery, with Karen Joy Fowler. Earthsea Revisioned, "A lectured delivered under the title Children, Women, Men and Dragons at Worlds Apart, an institute sponsored by Children's Literature New England," 2-8 August 1992 at Oxford U (UK).
1994 "The Matter of Seggri" in Crank! ; "Betrayals" in Blue Motel; "Solitude" published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. "Another Story, or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea" in Tomorrow. A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, coll. SF stories. Going Out With Peacocks and Other Poems, including animals poems and political poems (feminist, leftist).
1995 Hubbub annual poetry award for "Semen" (coll. Going Out with Peacocks). Theodore Sturgeon Award and Locus Readers Award for "Forgiveness Day" (coll. Four Ways to Forgiveness). James Tiptree, Jr. Award for "The Matter of Seggri."
"Coming of Age in Karhide." New Legends. Ed. Greg Bear. New York: Tor Books, 1995. The Year's Best Science Fiction. Thirteenth Annual Collection. Ed. Gardner Dozois. New York: St. Martin's, 1996.
Unlocking the Air and Other Stories published (mostly fantasy and "mundane" fiction).2
Four Ways to Forgiveness. New York: HarperPrism-HarperPaperbacks (HarperCollins), 1995. Collects "Betrayals" (from Blue Motel 1994); "Forgiveness Day," Asimov's Science Fiction 18.12-13 (Nov. 1994): [262]-304; "A Man of the People," Asimov's Science Fiction 19.4-5 (April 1995): 22-65; "A Woman's Liberation," Asimov's Science Fiction 19.8 (July 1995): [116]-63 1995.
<25th Anniversary of the first Earth Day.>
1997 The Twins, the Dream/Las Gemelas, el Sueño, with Diana Bellessi: Arte Publico Press: Poems, mutually translated.
Steering the Craft . . . . Small book: Discussions and exercises for writers, on narrative-prose technique.
Lao Tzu: The Tao Teh Ching. A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way: 1997/98.
Brief Biography
Ursula Kroeber was born 21 October 1929 (St. Ursula's Day) in Berkeley, California, the youngest child of Theodora and Alfred Kroeber. Theodora Kroeber had an M.A. in psychology in 1920 and, by 1961, a reputation as an author. Alfred was one of the founders of American anthropology and a world-class scholar. During the academic year, the Kroebers lived in a substantial house they owned in Berkeley; over the summer and other vacations, they lived at their country house in the Napa Valley, on a forty-acre estate they named Kishamish. The family appears to have been stable, loving, supportive, and "functional," and neither the Great Depression nor World War II seems to have harmed the family as a unit or Ursula and her three brothers individually.
The Kroebers were cosmopolitan, and "bicoastal" long before the term was invented. Theodora Kroeber was thoroughly Western ("the redhead from Telluride" and before that Denver, CO), but Alfred studied literature at Columbia University in New York City and after retiring from the University of California at Berkeley taught as a visiting professor at such Eastern citadels as Harvard (1947-48), Columbia (1948-52), Brandeis (1954), and Yale (1958). Between 1947 and 1951, Ursula studied as an undergraduate at Radcliffe College for women affiliated then as now with Harvard University and then went on to Columbia for graduate work, her time at Radcliffe and Columbia overlapping with her father's time at Harvard and Columbia. When Ursula became pregnant shortly before graduating Radcliffe, she consulted with her parents at their home on Riverside Drive; the elder Kroebers arranged for an abortion, at that time and place, an act of criminal conspiracy (DEW 76).
Ursula's original ambitions were for careers in biology and poetry, but "her inability to handle math caused her to drop biology" (De Bolt 16). Her collegiate work was in French and Italian Renaissance literature, and in 1953, Ursula won a Fulbright fellowship to work in France on her Ph.D. On the ship crossing to Europe, she met the historian Charles A. Le Guin, and they were married in Paris in December of 1953.
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin dropped her plans for the Ph.D. and followed Charles to Mercer University in Macon, GA, then to Emory University in Atlanta, where Charles got his Ph.D., to the University of Idaho at Moscow. While living in Moscow, ID, Le Guin gave birth to Elizabeth, the Le Guin's first child. In 1959, Charles got a job at Portland State University, and the family moved to Portland, OR. As of this writing, the Le Guins have kept Portland for their home, have remained married, and have raised three children: Elizabeth as mentioned, Caroline, and Theodore. For eighteen years, the Le Guins have shared territory with a male cat named Lorenzo Bean, and Le Guin has rarely described a scene with a potential cat in it without producing a cat, plus producing the Catwings series of picture books.
On 5 October 1960, Alfred L. Kroeber died at eighty-four years of age on in Paris; he was buried in Berkeley, CA. Theodora Kroeber died in 1979 at about age eighty-two. In a sentence Joe De Bolt quite properly made much of in his "A Le Guin Biography" (1979), Le Guin tells us that "Coming of age is a process that took me many years; I finished it, as far as I ever will, at about age thirty-one; and so I feel rather deeply about it" (LoN [1979]: 55).
Coming into adulthood is important, but would-be biologist and thoroughly honest woman "going through the change," Le Guin reminds readers that there is, for women, an additional physiological passage. Le Guin tells us that in 1976 she entered menopause and began to take up "the opportunity to become a Crone" (DEW 3). By the time of her parents' deaths, Le Guin had gone from virgin to the Woman and mother biologically and had achieved success getting her intellectual "offspring" into the world. By the late 1970s, Le Guin was ready for "a change involving matters even more important if I may venture a heresy than sex," to "bear herself, her third self, her old age" (DEW 5). In terms of Coyote's Song, the continuities and changes implicit in the idea of giving birth to oneself are most legitimately seen in Le Guin's work as an artist.
Le Guin's first published short story appeared in 1961, "An Die Musik," a tale set in Orsinia: a very realistically described Central European country, which exists only in Le Guin's imagination. It's an important place. As Elizabeth Cummins stresses, it is one of Le Guin's four great settings: Orsinia, the Hainish Universe (human space from our near future to some five millennia in the future), Earthsea (in Earth's fantasy past), and the American West Coast (Understanding passim). Orsinia is also a very personal place for Le Guin, the location of her first stories and some of her later ones, and a place playing on her name: Ursa (she-bear) / Ursula (little she-bear) / Orsino (bearish) / Orsinia (see Bittner [29], 131 n. 1). Le Guin's first professional story, the first one she got paid for, was published in 1962, the mildly fantastic, brief comic romance (with a sting to it), "April in Paris."
From there, Le Guin's career rose on an exponential curve. She published two stories in 1963, three stories in 1964, including two set in the problematically-heroic fantasy world of Earthsea, and three novels between 1965-67: Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions the works laying the foundation for her Hainish universe. In 1968 A Wizard of Earthsea appeared, followed in 1969 by "Nine Lives," The Left Hand of Darkness, and the associated story "Winter's King" (Hainish universe stories). And with her 1969 publications began the awards: first the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for A Wizard of Earthsea, then, for The Left Hand of Darkness, the 1970 Hugo more formally, the Science Fiction Achievement Award from the 1970 World Science Fiction Convention ("Worldcon"), the main annual meeting of SF fans. The Left Hand of Darkness also won a Nebula Award, a prize instituted by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1966. Le Guin won the Hugo and Nebula again in 1974 for her Hainish universe "ambiguous utopia," The Dispossessed. She won Hugos for The Word for World Is Forest and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and a Nebula for "The Day Before the Revolution." In 1971 and 1972, Le Guin finished her initial trilogy on Earthsea with The Tombs of Atuan (The Newbery Silver Medal Award book) and The Farthest Shore (winner of the National Book Award).
In 1970 Le Guin published "A Trip to the Head," a story she describes in the headnote in The Wind's Twelve Quarters as "definitely a Bung Puller" getting the words flowing again after a brief period of writer's block that wouldn't allow her past the line, from the "other" to the tentatively male protagonist, "Try being Amanda." The Lathe of Heaven came out in 1971, Le Guin's first published work in her fourth major world: the west coast of North America, in Lathe, exclusively Portland, OR. The other major west-coast stories are "The New Atlantis" (1975) and Always Coming Home, a long work that collects many of Le Guin's shorter pieces (1985). Lathe is the one Le Guin story so far to get filmed: for the Public Broadcasting Service, 1980. Le Guin has not given up on writing scripts, however; she published the screenplay King Dog (1985) and has worked on at least one script making the rounds: "A Wizard of Earthsea" (1981), co-written with Michael Powell and based on A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan.
Le Guin has revisited Orsinia to collect her stories set there in Orsinian Tales (1976) and in a major work, the novel Malafrena (1979); and she has returned to Earthsea for apparently the last time to pick up the story of Tenar, the point of view character and female lead in Tombs of Atuan, and, secondarily, of Ged, the hero of the trilogy: in Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990).
Le Guin's creative work outside of her four major worlds has included the novella "The Eye of the Heron" (1978) an important examination of the uses and limitations of nonviolent, loving resistance audio tape versions of her stories, four collections of poems, six collections of short stories and novellas, two short young-adult novels and a series of picture books, including the Catwings series: stories for children that return, in good quest fashion, to a beautiful touch in her first book, the great winged cats of Rocannon's World. 3 There is continuity with change however: the Catwings are not the great, heroic beasts of Rocannon's World, but normal-size Terran cats, living on a mundane Earth and unusual only in their ability to fly and to talk.
Like a number of writers of SF, Le Guin herself works in science fiction criticism. Many of her essays and talks collected in Language of the Night and Dancing at the Edge of the World are science fiction criticism and of such quality that Le Guin received the 1989 Pilgrim Award of the Science Fiction Research Association. Le Guin has also been active with the journal Science-Fiction Studies; from its fourth issue through the nineteenth (vol. 1, part 4 [Fall 1974]-6.3 [Nov. 1979]), she was first the and then a Contributing Editor, with the other Contributing Editor the Polish author, Stanislaw Lem. From the twentieth issue on (7.1 [March 1980]), she has been an Editorial Consultant, i.e., a scholar available to referee manuscripts. Other SFS editorial consultants include Brian Aldiss, H. Bruce Franklin, Frederic Jameson, Pamela Sargent, and, until his death, Northrop Frye: people of good reputation in literature and publishing. Arthur C. Clarke and Le Guin are the Patrons of the Science Fiction Foundation of the United Kingdom.
There are two major S.F. journals in North America, and Le Guin has had a special issue of each devoted to her work: SFS #7 (2.3 [Nov. 1975]) and Extrapolation (21.3 [Fall 1980]). Works published under the title or main title Ursula K. Le Guin include the anthology of essays edited by Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg (1979), the anthology of essays edited by Joe De Bolt (1979), and the Twayne volume by Charlotte Spivack (1984). There are also The Farthest Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin by George Edgar Slusser (1976), Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin by James W. Bittner (1984), and an initial (1990) and revised/expanded (1993) edition of Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin by Elizabeth Cummins indeed, to sum up rather literally, some 761 entries for "Critical and Bio-Bibliographical Studies"{sic} of Le Guin cited by Elizabeth Cummins Cogell in her 1983 Ursula K. Le Guin: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, and Cummins stopped with 1981. 4 A quick search of "WorldCat" for books with "Ursula K. Le Guin" in the title, excluding works listing Le Guin as author, brought 46 entries.
Three of Le Guin's stories have been "canonized" with a vengeance. "The New Atlantis" is in the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, the "Shorter" as well as the regular edition. "Nine Lives" has been very frequently reprinted, including in the anthology put out by the Science Fiction Writers of America and the Science Fiction Research Association (1978) and in the SFRA (going-it-alone) anthology of 1988, both volumes titled simply, Science Fiction. With "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973), Le Guin has o'erleaped the walls of the S.F. ghetto. This story is in anthologies edited by Robert Scholes, X. J. Kennedy, and Northrop Frye, and made it into The Norton Introduction to Fiction and The Norton Introduction to Literature. First year students in colleges and universities in the United States of the 1990s may find it difficult to miss "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."
Equally impressive is Le Guin's having been a creative writer invited to attend, and the one person invited to respond to, the symposium on "Narrative: The Illusion of Sequence," 26-28 October 1979 (Mitchell 1). This was a Symposium at the University of Chicago, funded by a bureau of the University, and by "the Midwest Faculty Seminar with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation." Invited guests included Seymour Chatman, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Barbara Myerhoff, Paul Ricoeur, Roy Schafer, Robert Scholes, Barbara Hernstein Smith, and Victor Turner (Mitchell 4) people Le Guin correctly calls, "Big Guns" (DEW 21) in a variety of fields, at a meeting held at an elite private university and paid for in part by a well-established and very well-endowed private foundation.
By the 1980s, then, Le Guin had arrived; she'd been accepted by those who teach the literary establishment what to accept, what to take seriously. Once you've arrived, though, the question is "Where to from here?" The answer I can give takes up a fair amount of my discussion of Le Guin's works from about "The Eye of the Heron" on. In her pamphlet Earthsea Revisioned Le Guin writes:
By the early seventies, when I finished the third book of Earthsea [FS], traditional definitions and values of masculinity and femininity were all in question. I'd been questioning them myself in other books. Women readers were asking how come all the wise guys on the Isle of the Wise were guys. The artist who was above gender had been exposed as a man hiding in a raincoat. No serious writer could, or can, go on pretending to be genderless. I couldn't continue my hero-tale until I had, as woman and artist, wrestled with the angels of the feminist consciousness. It took me a long time to get their blessing. (ER 11)
By the 1990s, Le Guin had won her wrestling match with feminist consciousness as much as such matches can be won or lost: she was working her way toward her own voice, as Cummins stresses, doing her part in the cultural work of the invention of the feminist novel.
Chronology / Biograpny: End Notes
1 Some historical background is given in pointed brackets: < >; some of the literary context is provided in square brackets: [ ]. Note that my mentioning a bracketed work does not mean it was read by and influenced Le Guin, or even that I have read it; I mention works I think useful for context for Le Guin and her original audience.
2 "Mundane" is Samuel R. Delany's suggestion for literature that is not fantasy, science fiction, "magical realism," etc. but in the mimetic-empirical tradition. One should accept "mundane's" denotation—"down to Earth"—and ignore its connotation of "unimaginative." The connotation is a problem, but less problematic than calling SF and its generic relatives "imaginative literature" and implying that the works of, say, George Eliot are unimaginative. Talking of "realism" closes examination of what is real, and using "mainstream," fudges the question, "The main stream of what?" The main stream of world literature since the invention of writing seems to center on something like fantasy; and what an unmodified "mainstream" refers to would require a massive empirical study that seems a waste of time and effort, and the money it would require.) See Le Guin's Preface to LoN (1989) for comments on "The Canoneers of Literature," women authors, and genre (3-5).
3 Like "The Word for World Is Forest," "The Eye of the Heron" has been published independently as a novel, and that is the way I will discuss it; it's initial context of Millennia Women, ed. by Le Guin's agent, Virginia Kidd, is important, as is the first appearance of WWF as one of the stories in Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions. Note that one could see EoH set on an isolated world at about the time the Hainish arrived at Terra to reunite the human genus.
4 "Elizabeth Cummins" and "Elizabeth Cummins Cogell" are two forms of the name of one person (and one fine critic and bibliographer).