1947
Graduates high school in class of 3,500, which includes Philip K. Dick. The two never meet, although they later correspond. Father accepts a one-year appointment at Harvard University, and it is decided that, with parents nearby, Ursula will attend Radcliffe College instead of the University of California. Spends summer with parents and Karl in New York City, where father teaches at Columbia University until Harvard appointment begins. They rent an apartment from parents’ friends near 116th and Broadway and spend the summer seeing many plays and Broadway shows. Takes recorder lessons with Blanche Knopf. Moves to Radcliffe in the fall. Lives last three college years in Radcliffe cooperative Everett House with close friends Jean Taylor and Marion Ives.
1948
Father returns to Columbia, where he will teach until 1952. Spends summer with parents in New York City, this time in another apartment rented from parents’ friends, near 116th and Riverside Drive.
1950
A relationship in her senior year at Radcliffe results in an unplanned pregnancy; an illegal abortion is arranged with the help of friends and parents.
1951
Elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Graduates cum laude from Radcliffe in June, writing a senior thesis titled “The Metaphor of the Rose as an Illustration of the ‘Carpe Diem’ Theme in French and Italian Poetry of the Renaissance.” College acquaintances include John Updike, who marries one of her housemates. Travels to Paris with Karl and begins writing novel A Descendance, about the imaginary Central European country of Orsinia, whose name reflects her own: both come from the Latin word for “bear.” Starts graduate work at Columbia in the fall. Begins writing and attempting to publish poetry and stories. Father helps her submit poems for publication, mailing her submissions and also investigating subculture of little magazines.
1952
Completes an M.A. in Renaissance French and Italian language and literature at Columbia University, writing a thesis titled “Aspects of Death in Ronsard’s Poetry” on the sixteenth-century French poet Pierre Ronsard. Begins work on a doctorate at Columbia on the early sixteenth-century poet Jean Lemaire de Belges. Begins writing new Orsinian novel called, variously, Malafrena and The Necessary Passion.
1953
Receives a Fulbright Fellowship to study in France. Departs from New York on September 23 on the Queen Mary. On the ship she meets fellow Fulbrighter Charles Alfred Le Guin (born June 4, 1927, in Macon, Georgia), who is writing his thesis on the French Revolution. On December 22, marries Le Guin in Paris after numerous delays in procuring a marriage license—later says there was “always another tax stamp we needed across the city.” (On the marriage license, a space between “Le” and “Guin” is restored, in a surname that had not had one in America.)
1954
Le Guins return to U.S. on the Ile de France ship in August. Ends graduate work and the Le Guins move to Macon, Georgia, where Charles teaches history and Ursula teaches freshman French at Mercer University. Meets Charles’s large extended family. Sees, and is first puzzled and then appalled by, her first sign for a “Colored Drinking Fountain.”
1955
Completes first version of novel The Necessary Passion, which she submits to Alfred Knopf, a friend of her father’s, and receives an encouraging rejection letter. In a 2013 interview, Le Guin will recall that “the first novel I ever wrote was very strange, very ambitious. It covered many generations in my invented Central European country, Orsinia. My father knew Alfred Knopf personally. . . . When I was about twenty-three, I asked my father if he felt that my submitting the novel to Knopf would presume on their friendship, and he said, No, go ahead and try him. So I did, and Knopf wrote a lovely letter back. He said, I can’t take this damn thing. I would’ve done it ten years ago, but I can’t afford to now. He said, This is a very strange book, but you’re going somewhere! That was all I needed. I didn’t need acceptance.” Works as a physics department secretary at Emory University in Atlanta, where Charles is completing his Ph.D.
1956
Charles receives his doctorate from Emory and they move to Moscow, Idaho, where they both begin teaching at the University of Idaho. At first they live in poorly insulated temporary housing; in the winter the books in their study freeze to the wall. Out of boredom in a rather insular community, together with friends they fabricate items about an imaginary poetry society (including poems by Le Guin’s alter ego Mrs. R. R. Korsatoff) and succeed in placing them on the society page of the local newspaper. Reads The Lord of the Rings. Submits manuscript of “Edward and Sylvie,” novel set in California, to Knopf, who rejects it while encouraging her to submit elsewhere.
1957
Oldest child Elisabeth Covel Le Guin is born, July 25.
1958
Moves to Portland, Oregon, where Charles takes up position as professor of French history at Portland State University (then College). They buy a Victorian house below Portland’s Forest Park, where they will live for the next six decades. Submits novel “Lands End” to Scribner and Houghton Mifflin; both reject it.
1959
Spends summer at Berkeley with parents and Karl’s family. The Orsinian poem “Folksong from the Montayna Province” appears in the fall issue of the journal Prairie Poet. It is her first published work. Second child Caroline DuPree Le Guin is born, November 4. Mother publishes The Inland Whale, a book of retold legends from California Indians, including the title story, which was learned from Yurok storyteller (and frequent guest at Kishamish) Robert Spott.
1960
Father dies in Paris on October 5 after conducting an anthropology conference in Austria the previous week. Later refers to this as the time when she “came of age, rather belatedly, at age 31.”
1961
Mother publishes her most famous work, Ishi in Two Worlds, based on her husband’s memories and on her own research. Le Guin’s Orsinian story “An die Musik” is published in the summer issue of Western Humanities Review; she is paid five contributor’s copies. The same week it is accepted, she also makes her first commercial sale: the time-travel story “April in Paris” is accepted by editor Cele Goldsmith Lalli for Fantastic magazine, for which Le Guin is paid $30. Rewrites Malafrena.
1962
Encouraged by a friend, begins reading science fiction writers Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and Theodore Sturgeon.
1964
Youngest child Theodore Alfred (Theo) Le Guin is born, June 4. (While the children are young she writes mostly after nine at night.) Moves for the academic year to Palo Alto, California, where Charles is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Writes her first science fiction novel, Rocannon’s World. Her turn to science fiction is partly stimulated by reading the American author Cordwainer Smith and her resultant discovery that the genre has become a vehicle for inward as well as outward exploration. In a 1986 interview, she will explain, “To me encountering his works was like a door opening. There is one story of his called ‘Alpha Ralpha Boulevard’ that was as important to me as reading Pasternak for the first time.”
1965
Acting as her own agent, sells Rocannon’s World to Donald A. Wollheim at Ace Books.
1966
Rocannon’s World is published as half of a back-to-back edition, known as an Ace Double, with Avram Davidson’s The Kar-Chee Reign. Wollheim speaks proudly of finding Le Guin’s novel in the slush pile (of manuscripts sent without an agent). Soon afterward, Terry Carr creates the Ace Science Fiction Specials line to feature work by Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and R. A. Lafferty. The character Rocannon is a native of a world called Hain by its inhabitants and Davenant by others. In later books set in the same universe Hain is identified as the oldest human world, and the others (including Terra) as its colonies or (as in the case of Gethen) its experiments. Planet of Exile is published in October as half of an Ace Double with Thomas M. Disch’s Mankind Under the Leash.
1967
City of Illusions is published by Ace Books.
1968
Writes to literary agent Virginia Kidd, herself a writer and editor of science fiction and poetry, asking her to try to sell hardcover rights to a new novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. Kidd replies that she will, but only if she can also represent the rest of Le Guin’s work. The two work together (though they meet in person only four times) until Kidd’s death in 2003. Publishes letter, along with eighty-one other science fiction writers (including Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and Gene Roddenberry), in Galaxy magazine in June protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam. An opposing prowar letter is signed by seventy-two writers, including Robert A. Heinlein, John W. Campbell, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. In fall, moves to England as part of Charles’s sabbatical. During that time she writes “The Word for World Is Forest,” set in the Hainish universe but depicting some of the moral issues of the Vietnam War. Fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea is published in November by Parnassus Books.
1969
A Wizard of Earthsea wins the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for children’s literature. The Left Hand of Darkness is published by Ace Books as an Ace Science Fiction Special in March. The book’s vision of androgyny is criticized by some feminists as overly cautious, a critique to which Le Guin responds defensively at first and then with a serious rethinking of her concept of gender in essays such as “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” (1976, revised 1987) and the story “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995). The story “Nine Lives” appears in Playboy in November with the byline U. K. Le Guin. The initials are a deliberate ploy by Virginia Kidd, given the gender policies of the magazine. After the story is accepted, the magazine editors ask if they can keep the name in that form to veil the author’s gender from readers. Le Guin agrees, in part because of the large payment the magazine offers, but when asked for an autobiographical statement offers the following, which Playboy prints: “The stories of U. K. Le Guin were not written by U. K. Le Guin but by another person of the same name.” Children’s writer and critic Eleanor Cameron writes in praise of A Wizard of Earthsea and begins a decades-long correspondence with Le Guin. The two writers are both, at the time, beginning to come to terms with feminism and are working at learning how to write as women and about female protagonists. This friendship with an older writer presages the many supportive relationships Le Guin is to form with younger women writers such as Vonda N. McIntyre, Karen Joy Fowler, and Molly Gloss. Mother remarries, to artist and art psychotherapist John Quinn, who is forty-three years her junior, on December 14.
1970
The Left Hand of Darkness wins both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel, selected, respectively, by fans and fellow writers. The Science Fiction Foundation is created in England with Le Guin and Arthur C. Clarke as patrons. The Tombs of Atuan, second Earthsea novel, is serialized in December in Worlds of Fantasy and published by Atheneum in June the following year.
1971
The Lathe of Heaven is serialized in the March and May issues of Amazing Science Fiction and published in October by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Le Guin’s first science fiction novel set on Earth, it incorporates her thoughts on dreaming (pioneering dream researcher William Dement is a consultant), ecological catastrophe, and Taoist ideas of inaction and integrity. At a Science Fiction Writers of America meeting in Berkeley meets Vonda N. McIntyre, who will become a close friend and collaborator. McIntyre invites Le Guin to teach science fiction writing at the first Clarion West workshop at the University of Washington.
1972
The Tombs of Atuan is selected as a Newbery Honor Book by the American Library Association. The Lathe of Heaven wins the Locus Award for best novel. “The Word for World Is Forest,” written in 1968–69, appears in Harlan Ellison’s anthology Again, Dangerous Visions in March. In part an allegory of the Vietnam War, the novella (published as a separate volume in 1976) influences James Cameron’s 2009 movie Avatar. Third Earthsea novel, The Farthest Shore, is published in September by Atheneum.
1973
The Farthest Shore wins the National Book Award for Children’s Literature. Le Guin’s acceptance speech, “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?,” is a major defense of fantasy literature. “The Word for World Is Forest” wins the Hugo Award for best novella. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a story inspired by philosopher William James, is published in New Dimensions 3 in October.
1974
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” wins the Hugo Award for best short story. Douglas Barbour publishes an academic investigation of Le Guin’s work in Science Fiction Studies. Completes novel The Dispossessed, its main character Shevek partly based on a childhood memory of physicist Robert Oppenheimer; revises ending at the urging of her friend Darko Suvin, a Croatian literary critic. Senior editor Buz Wyeth acquires the novel for Harper & Row, which publishes it in May. Wyeth remains her editor for several years.
Takes part in a virtual symposium on “Women in Science Fiction,” organized by editor and fan Jeffrey D. Smith. Participants such as Suzy McKee Charnas, Virginia Kidd, Samuel R. Delany, Vonda N. McIntyre, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree Jr. write a round robin of letters and responses on a variety of topics, starting in October 1974 and continuing until May 1975. Their discussions are published in the fanzine Khatru in November 1975. Tiptree, believed by the other participants to be a man (the writer’s identity as Alice Sheldon is not revealed until 1977), expresses a number of challenging ideas about gender and power.
1975
Poetry collection Wild Angels is published in January. The Dispossessed wins the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Awards. In August, attends the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, in Melbourne, Australia, where she is a guest of honor, and also spends a week conducting a science fiction writing workshop using the Clarion method. In May, dystopian novella “The New Atlantis” is published as part of a triptych with novellas by Gene Wolfe and James Tiptree Jr. The first collection of Le Guin’s short stories is published under the title The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. The Le Guins spend another sabbatical year in London starting in the fall; Ursula is a visiting fellow in creative writing at the University of Reading. In November Science Fiction Studies devotes a special issue to her work.
1976
During their stay in England, the Le Guins travel to Dorset to meet writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, who was an early influence on her work; Ursula says later, “I hold it one of the dearest honors of my life that I knew her for an hour.” Young adult novel Very Far Away from Anywhere Else published in August by Atheneum. A second collection of stories, Orsinian Tales, published in October by Harper & Row.
1977
At the invitation of utopian scholar Robert Elliott, teaches a term at the University of California, San Diego. Among her students are aspiring writers Kim Stanley Robinson and Luis Alberto Urrea.
1978
Again rewrites early novel Malafrena, finishing in December. Science fiction novella “The Eye of the Heron” appears in the original anthology Millennial Women, edited by Virginia Kidd, in August. Mother falls ill.
1979
Wins the Gandalf Grand Master Award for life achievement in fantasy writing. Susan Wood edits the first volume of Le Guin’s speeches and essays, The Language of the Night. Around this time she discovers the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, a favorite and acknowledged influence. Mother dies of cancer on July 4. Le Guin’s first children’s picture book, Leese Webster, is published with illustrations by James Brunsman in September by Atheneum. Malafrena is published in October by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Le Guin is invited to take part in a symposium on narrative at the University of Chicago, October 26–28, along with scholars and writers such as Seymour Chatman, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Robert Scholes, Victor Turner, Paul Ricoeur, and Hayden White. Her contribution at the end of the symposium is “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; or, Why Are We Huddling Around the Campfire?”, a piece that is both a witty summary of the discussions and a metanarrative about the value of story. She wrote in a headnote to the
published version that “I had bought my first and only pair of two-inch-heeled shoes, black French ones, to wear there, but I never dared put them on; there were so many Big Guns shooting at one another that it seemed unwise to try to increase my stature.” Short story “Two Delays on the Northern Line” is published in The New Yorker in the November 12 issue.
1980
On January 9, television movie of The Lathe of Heaven airs, filmed by PBS station WNET with a script by Roger Swaybill and Diane English with extensive contributions by David Loxton and Le Guin. Charles and Ursula appear as extras, an experience she writes about in an essay called “Working on ‘The Lathe.’” Le Guin likes the film and finds the whole experience quite positive, in contrast to later experiences with film adaptations of her work. Young adult novel The Beginning Place published in February by Harper & Row. It is reviewed in The New Yorker by John Updike in June. Collaborates with Virginia Kidd as editors of the anthologies Edges and Interfaces. From 1980 to 1993, teaches many times at The Flight of the Mind writing workshop for women in McKenzie Bridge, Oregon, in her opinion her most valuable teaching experience.
1981
Poetry collection Hard Words published by Harper.
1982
“Sur,” a story that is not so much alternative history as crypto-history (the female explorers who are first to the South Pole keep their feat a secret), appears in The New Yorker in January. The New Yorker publishes two more of her stories this year, in July and October.
1984
Brian Booth founds the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts and invites Le Guin, along with Floyd Skloot and William Stafford, to become members of the advisory board.
1985
In January, The New Yorker publishes “She Unnames Them,” a story of a type that Le Guin has called a “psychomyth.” In October, publishes a major new science fiction novel, Always Coming Home, set in the future California. Novel involves collaboration with geologist George Hersh, artist Margaret Chodos, and composer Todd Barton, whose music of the imagined Kesh people is included on a cassette tape with the original boxed set (and creates problems with the Library of Congress, which objects to copyrighting the music of indigenous peoples). The book wins the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman and is a runner-up for the National Book Award. It also creates a stir among more conservative science fiction readers and writers for being what they consider antitechnology; Le Guin points out that the book is pervaded with technology, though the technology is predicated upon a sustainable use of resources. Publishes a screenplay, King Dog, based on a segment of Hindu epic the Mahabharata. Composer Elinor Armer composes song settings of poems from Le Guin’s collection Wild Angels. The two meet and begin to collaborate on eight musical compositions for orchestra and voices called Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts.
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