American novelist whose work inside the marginalized commercial genres of science fiction and fantasy built — across twenty-three novels, a dozen story collections, and six decades — one of the most politically and philosophically serious bodies of fiction produced by any American writer of her generation. Daughter of the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber (whose Ishi in Two Worlds is the life of the last Yahi man her father studied), Le Guin carried the anthropological sensibility into fiction that took seriously the idea that human social arrangements are varied, historical, and could be otherwise.
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) imagines a planet whose inhabitants are genderless except during a monthly estrus in which any individual can become either male or female — a thought experiment that feminist science fiction has never quite exhausted. The Dispossessed (1974), subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia," is the great modern anarchist novel, setting an austere anarcho-syndicalist moon against the consumer-capitalist and state-socialist planet it orbits, and refusing to let either side of the comparison off. The Earthsea sequence (A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968; The Tombs of Atuan, 1971; The Farthest Shore, 1972; and — twenty years later, reconsidering the patriarchal bones of her own youthful fantasy — Tehanu, 1990, and after) is among the great achievements of modern fantasy.
Le Guin was a lifelong reader of Laozi (her working version of the Tao Te Ching, 1997, is the culmination of decades of study) and of Kropotkin, whose mutual-aid anarchism is the political ground of The Dispossessed. Her 2014 National Book Foundation speech — "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings" — went viral in an industry not given to such statements, and remains the clearest short statement of her politics. Her essays, collected in The Language of the Night (1979), Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989), and No Time to Spare (2017), argue across forty years for the dignity of imaginative literature and for the anthropological seriousness of forms the literary establishment had dismissed.