Public History Commons, Home Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin. 5, Charles Le Guin The writer Ursula K Le Guin, who has died aged 88, presided over American science fiction for nearly half a century. It wasn't until I came back to science fiction and discovered Sturgeon but particularly Cordwainer Smith. Oral History Commons, > The U.S. Library of Congress named her a Living Legend in 2000, and in 2014, she won the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She won eight Hugo Awards from twenty-six nominations, and six Nebula Awards from eighteen nominations, including four Nebula Awards for Best Novel from six nominations, more than any other writer. She was 88. [10], Le Guin's writing career began in the late 1950s, but the time she spent caring for her children constrained her writing schedule. [108] She stated elsewhere that she had never read Jung before writing the first Earthsea books. [40][94] Her best-known works include the six volumes of the Earthsea series, and the many novels of the Hainish Cycle. The PSU community connected faculty and students to cultural as well as academic resources in Portland including music, theater, and the arts, and was vitally involved in political and creative movements. [126] Le Guin suggested the term "social science fiction" for some of her writing, while pointing out that many of her stories were not science fiction at all. Chuck Becker discusses the department's founding years at Vanport and its differentiation from the Athletics program, for which he also served as a football coach. Her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven has been released on film twice, in 1979 by WNET with Le Guin's participation, and then in 2002 by the A&E Network. Le Guin's first novel was "Rocannon's World" in 1966 but she gained fame three years later with "The Left Hand of Darkness," which won the Hugo and Nebula awards top science fiction prizes . Their summer retreat, an old ranch named "Kishamish" in the hills of Napa Valley, was a gathering place for scientists, writers, students, and California Indians. In this interview with Michael ORourke, Mr. Lemman discusses his experiences and accomplishments from his undergraduate years at Vanport until his administrative position in Oregon higher education, and remembers faculty, students, and administrators with whom he worked to grow Portland State into an urban campus of almost thirty thousand students. Le Guin describes his studies: I came to Emory to pursue my PhD in 1950 and Joseph Mathews undertook to guide me to my degree: it took a whilea Fulbright and some teachingbefore that was accomplished. In Oregon, Willamette Writers honored her with a Lifetime Achievement Award, and she received two Endeavour Awards from Oregon Science Fiction Conventions and the Charles Erskine Scott Wood Distinguished Writer Award from Oregon Literary Arts. The Oregon History Wayfinder is an interactive map that identifies significant places, people, and events in Oregon history. She married historian Charles A. The heterogeneous structure of The Left Hand of Darkness, described as "distinctly post-modern", was unusual for the time of its publication. In this interview, former Oregon University System Vice-Chancellor and Portland State University administrator Bill Lemman discusses his career in higher education in Oregon with Clarence Hein. | > It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer's or the reader's. In April 2000, the U.S. Library of Congress named Le Guin a Living Legend in the "Writers and Artists" category for her significant contributions to America's cultural heritage. [173][174] The Word for World is Forest explored the manner in which the structure of society affects the natural environment; in the novel, the natives of the planet of Athshe have adapted their way of life to the ecology of the planet. [5] Her final publications included the non-fiction collections Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Ursula K Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, and the poetry volume So Far So Good: Final Poems 20142018, all of which were released after her death. W.T. [127] In discovering these "alien" worlds, Le Guin's protagonists, and by extension the readers, also journey into themselves, and challenge the nature of what they consider "alien" and what they consider "native". [48], When publishing her story "Nine Lives" in 1968, Playboy magazine asked Le Guin whether they could run the story without her full first name, to which Le Guin agreed: the story was published under the name "U. K. Le Guin". [21] She also worked as an editor, and taught undergraduate classes. Ursula K. Le Guin. Born in Berkeley, California, on October 21, 1929, Le Guin attended both Radcliffe College and Columbia University and was a Fulbright Scholar in Paris. Le Guin wrote in a 1973 essay that she chose to explore coming-of-age in Earthsea since she was writing for an adolescent audience: "Coming of age is a process that took me many years; I finished it, so far as I ever will, at about age thirty-one; and so I feel rather deeply about it. Her father, Alfred Louis Kroeber, was an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. [2][40] Her books sold many millions of copies, and were translated into more than 40 languages; several remain in print many decades after their first publication. | [19] According to Le Guin, the marriage signaled the "end of the doctorate" for her. [53] The book was Le Guin's first to address feminist issues,[54] and according to scholar Donna White, it "stunned the science fiction critics"; it won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards for best novel, making Le Guin the first woman to win these awards, and a number of other accolades. She was active in the literary and political community of Portland and Oregon, including joining peace vigils at Pioneer Courthouse Square and giving early support for both Fishtrap and Oregon Literary Arts. [33][34], In December 2009, Le Guin resigned from the Authors Guild in protest over its endorsement of Google's book digitization project. [46] These stories were largely ignored by critics. [4] Le Guin had not planned to write for young adults, but was asked to write a novel targeted at this group by the editor of Parnassus Press, who saw it as a market with great potential. In 2018, Le Guin died of a heart attack (White, 2016). Accompanying them were two former School of Education faculty, Maxine Thomas and Steve Brannan. A USPS Tribute Video to Le Guin can be viewed here on Facebook. [72] The Language of the Night, a collection of essays, was released in 1979,[73] and Le Guin also published Wild Angels, a volume of poetry, in 1975. She intentionally used feminine pronouns for all sexually latent Gethenians in her 1995 short story "Coming of Age in Karhide", and in a later reprinting of "Winter's King", which was first published in 1969. [226], Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness was adapted for the stage in 1995 by Chicago's Lifeline Theatre. Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, to author Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber. LeGuin's novels and stories explore sexism, racism, nationalism, and the ambiguities of technological progress. Dr. Ramaley discusses her career and accomplishments as President of Portland State University (PSU) from 1990-1997, with emphasis on the development of PSU's general education program, productive collaboration between students, faculty, and the urban community, and growing Portland State as Oregon's urban university. This interview was held on February 21, 2019, at the Portland State University Library. [153] A Wizard of Earthsea focuses on Ged's adolescence, while The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore explore that of Tenar and the prince Arren, respectively. Le Guin recounts, I had had courses from him and he was in Paris when I was there on my Fulbright: indeed, he and Blair were at my wedding there. (Charles and his wife Ursula still have the samovar and tea cups that the Majors gave them as wedding presents. Le Guin often subverted typical speculative fiction tropes, such as through her use of dark-skinned protagonists in Earthsea, and also used unusual stylistic or structural devices in books such as the experimental work Always Coming Home (1985). The award is managed by the Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust and a panel of jurors. She expressed a deep interest in Taoism and Buddhism, saying that Taoism gave her a "handle on how to look at life" during her adolescent years. This includes an equilibrium between land and sea, implicit in the name "Earthsea", between people and their natural environment,[113] and a larger cosmic equilibrium, which wizards are tasked with maintaining. "There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle. Le Guin is Professor Emeritus of History at Portland State University, where he taught for over thirty-five years. Tehanu:The Last Book of Earthsea, for instance, written some twenty years after the original Earthsea trilogy, deliberately veered away from the male-centric heroism of the earlier books and toward the more "ordinary" heroism in the lives of women and children. But in a field largely dominated by mimics and gimmicks, Le. Cummins, Elizabeth. Many of her stories used anthropologists or cultural observers as protagonists, and Taoist ideas about balance and equilibrium have been identified in several writings. Social and political themes, including race, gender, sexuality, and coming of age were prominent in her writing. Heather Oriana PetrocelliFollow. She describes her early fiction as "just a little off." [27] The Lathe of Heaven, one of LeGuin's most renowned novels, is set in a future Portland. [2] Le Guin said she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist".[3]. Charles Le Guin, Ph.D. 1956, has written from Portland, Oregon. So do most adolescents. [40][76], Gender and sexuality are prominent themes in a number of Le Guin's works. After earning his degree in Business Administration at the University of Oregon in 1949, he returned to Vanport in 1950 as Assistant Business Manager. . Dr. Charles A. . [85][194] The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted her in 2001, its sixth class of two deceased and two living writers. He is an emeritus member of the Alumni Board and a founding member of the Friends of the Library. Please visit http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/rememberpsu_oralhist/ for more Portland State University oral histories.This digital access copy is made available by Portland State University Special Collections as streaming media for personal, educational, and non-commercial use only. The stamp features a portrait of the author taken from a 2006 photograph against a background image inspired by her book The Left Hand of Darkness. [140] Although The Left Hand of Darkness was seen as a landmark exploration of gender, it also received criticism for not going far enough. "You decided to deal with the devil", she wrote in her resignation letter. These stories are ageless because they deal with problems that confront us at any age."[120]. [200] The American Library Association granted her the annual Margaret Edwards Award in 2004, and also selected her to deliver the annual May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture. Scholar Jeanne Walker writes that the rite of passage at the end was an analogue for the entire plot of A Wizard of Earthsea, and that the plot itself plays the role of a rite of passage for an adolescent reader. [47] The first two were each published as half of an "Ace Double": two novels bound into a paperback and sold as a single low-cost volume. [40] Later in her career, she also received recognition from mainstream literary critics: in an obituary, Jo Walton stated that Le Guin "was so good that the mainstream couldn't dismiss SF any more". [147] This volume was described as a rewriting or reimagining of The Tombs of Atuan, because the power and status of the female protagonist Tenar are the inverse of what they were in the earlier book, which was also focused on her and Ged. [177][178] According to Rochelle, the stories examine a society that has the potential to build a "truly human community", made possible by the Ekumen's recognition of the slaves as human beings, thus offering them the prospect of freedom and the possibility of utopia, brought about through revolution. Ursula K. Le Guin, one of Oregons preeminent writers, was born Ursula Kroeber in 1929 in Berkeley, California, the youngest and only girl in a family of four children. [85] She won her final Hugo award a year after her death, for a complete edition of Earthsea, illustrated by Charles Vess; the same volume also won a Locus award. [14][33][97][98] She also considered J. R. R. Tolkien and Leo Tolstoy to be stylistic influences, and preferred reading Virginia Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges to well-known science-fiction authors such as Robert Heinlein, whose writing she described as being of the "white man conquers the universe" tradition. [50][51] A coming of age story set in the fictional archipelago of Earthsea, the book received a positive reception in both the U.S. and Britain. "[151] She also said that fantasy was best suited as a medium for describing coming of age, because exploring the subconscious was difficult using the language of "rational daily life". She also said she was better pleased with stage versions, including Paradises Lost, than screen adaptations of her work to that date. ) The year Dr. It is a sort of grand two person Emory History reunion way out here on the Upper Left Edge.. [111][112] Many of Le Guin's protagonists, including in The Lathe of Heaven, embody the Taoist ideal of leaving things alone. 5. These books and many othersincluding Lavinia (2008), an astonishing take on Virgil's [] Past the barriers at the entranceCharles's menacingly thorny roses, the lion . Le Guin finished his degree on the French Revolution, Dr. Mathews was abroad on a Fulbright at Oxford, and so Russell Major took over his training. Variables are the spice of life. | However, as Le Guin rose to popularity in science fiction, she gradually abandoned this job. [136] The story is set on the fictional planet of Gethen, whose inhabitants are ambisexual humans with no fixed gender identity, who adopt female or male sexual characteristics for brief periods of their sexual cycle. [74][75] She also revisited Earthsea, publishing Tehanu in 1990: coming eighteen years after The Farthest Shore, during which Le Guin's views had developed considerably, the book was grimmer in tone than the earlier works in the series, and challenged some ideas presented therein. [92] Although Annals of the Western Shore was written for an adolescent audience, the third volume, Powers, received the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2009. [57][101][102][103][104] She described living with her father's friends and acquaintances as giving her the experience of the other. [165], Alternative social and political systems are a recurring theme in Le Guin's writing. The Hainish subsequently colonized many planets, before losing contact with them, giving rise to varied but related biology and social structure. It received critical praise,[78] won Le Guin a third Nebula Award for Best Novel,[79] and led to the series being recognized among adult literature. She later wrote that it was the first and only time she had experienced prejudice against her as a woman writer from an editor or publisher, and reflected that "it seemed so silly, so grotesque, that I failed to see that it was also important." She explored alternative political structures in many stories, such as in the philosophical short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973) and the anarchist utopian novel The Dispossessed (1974). Le Guin's mother, Theodora Kroeber (1897-1979; born Theodora Covel Kracaw), had a graduate degree in psychology. [18] While her husband finished his doctorate at Emory University in Georgia, and later at the University of Idaho, Le Guin taught French and worked as a secretary until the birth of her daughter Elisabeth in 1957. [220] The prize's inaugural winner was announced on October 21, 2022, Le Guin's birthday. Cadden, Michael. [15], The influence of anthropology can be seen in the setting Le Guin chose for a number of her works. Born in Berkeley, California, in 1929, Le Guin began publishing science fiction in the early 1960s and within ten years was acknowledged as one of the most important writers in the genre . PORTLAND, Ore. Ursula K. Le Guin, the award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer who explored feminist themes and was best known for her Earthsea books, has died at 88. She was voted a Gandalf Grand Master Award by the World Science Fiction Society in 1979. 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