URSULA K.

LE GUIN
1929-2018

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

Published in October 1973
 PERSONAL LIFE

• Ursula was born October 21, 1929 to an anthropologist and a writer in California.
• She grew up around Native American tribes because of her father’s research and
from an early age, she learned how to use the land to her benefit.
• Ursula’s family was very academically driven, her father being a professor of
anthropology, her mother a successful author, and Ursula and her siblings found a
love of reading from a young age.
• She went to Radcliffe College to pursue a degree in French literature and
eventually obtained her master’s in French.
• Ursula married her husband, Charles Le Guin, in 1953 and they had three children.
 Le Guin’s writing style was described
as an “emphasis on how the conditions
would affect human behavior.” Her
work was mostly science fiction and at
the time of her death, she was believed
to be one of the most consequential
writers of the science fiction genre
from the last half century.

While Ursula mainly wrote science

fiction, her works were often reflective of
anthropological studies of the cultures and
civilizations she created and she often
pulled inspiration from various American
communities.
•Ursula was always changing and adapting her
stories, even after they were finished. She often
revisited her work to reimagine them in different
circumstances as the world changed. She would
change the gender, race, and identity of characters.
Her writing has feminist themes throughout it so she
reenvisaged one of her works as a female-dominated
civilization, rather than male-dominated.
•She also drew inspiration from several authors,
most notably J.R.R. Tolkien.
•In a republication of “The Ones Who Walk Away
from Omelas” in 1975, she explained in the preface
that a little of her inspiration for the story came from
authors William James and Fyodor Dostoevsky,
though only after rereading her short story did she
realize the similarities between the two authors’
works and her own.
 OTHER NOTABLE WORKS

• The Earthsea series (published 1968-2001)

• The Left Hand of Darkness (published 1969)
• The Dispossessed (published 1974)
• Always Coming Home (1985)
• In 2000, Ursula was awarded the Living Legend medal by the Library of Congress.
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CRITICS
CONNECTION TO DISCUSSIONS
WORKS CITED