Ursula K. Le Guin

Born in Berkeley in 1929 to two anthropologists, Ursula Kroeber earned a master's in French, started a doctorate, then dropped it after marrying historian Charles Le Guin in 1953. She began writing full-time in the late 1950s, publishing her first work in 1959. A Wizard of Earthsea arrived in 1968 with dark-skinned protagonists in a genre that rarely imagined them; The Left Hand of Darkness followed in 1969, winning her both major awards and making her the first woman to do so. Over nearly sixty years she wrote more than twenty novels and a hundred short stories, always pulling from anthropolo…