Ursula Le Guin Has Earned a Rare Honor. Just Don’t Call Her a Sci-Fi Writer.
By DAVID STREITFELDAUG. 28, 2016

The Library of America usually restricts itself to Melville, Twain, Hawthorne and the other distinguished dead. But a handful of times it has been so sure of a novelist’s importance that its austere black volumes started appearing while the writer was still alive. Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth got the call.

Ursula K. Le Guin is now on this very shortlist. The library’s original idea was to begin with some of her classic science fiction. But she pressed it to start instead with a volume of her lesser-known work.

“There’s some innate arrogance here: I want to do it my way,” Ms. Le Guin said in an interview at her home here. “I don’t want to be reduced to being ‘the sci-fi writer.’ People are always trying to push me off the literary scene, and to hell with it.”

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She chuckled. “I won’t be pushed.”

The result is that Ms. Le Guin’s “The Complete Orsinia” is being published on Sept. 6 as Library of America Vol. 281. It includes a little-known novel, “Malafrena,” set in an imaginary Central European country, and 13 related stories. The material spans the first half of Ms. Le Guin’s career, from her first published story in 1961 to 1990.

It is definitely not science fiction, and not quite fantasy either. Ms. Le Guin’s more casual fans, she acknowledged, might be surprised by it — a realistic work set in the early 19th century, a tale of a hopeful revolutionary at a moment when revolutions are impossible.

“Someone who pigeonholed me firmly will say, ‘What the hell?’ But that’s their problem.”

Ms. Le Guin is 86. She says “what the hell” a lot. She is too old, she says, to get on airplanes or even do events in Portland beyond an occasional bookstore appearance. So the world comes to her — up a hill, past a sign marked “no outlet,” across a bridge spanning a ravine too deep for trolls.

Her 1899 house is shielded by pink, yellow and red roses. In the living room there is a volume of word puzzles on a table and the books Ms. Le Guin and her husband, Charles, a retired historian, are reading aloud at night (“Two Years Before the Mast” and the poetry of Theodore Roethke). There is not a clue that anyone who lives here is a writer, much less America’s greatest living science fiction writer.

The internet is full of Le Guin fans who say she doesn’t get the credit she deserves. “The Word for World Is Forest” (1976), about malevolent humans brutally invading a planet of peaceful forest-dwelling aliens, anticipated James Cameron’s “Avatar” (2009), about malevolent humans brutally invading a planet of peaceful forest-dwelling aliens. “Planet of Exile” (1966) has 15-year seasons, barbarians invading from the north and vicious creatures called snowghouls, all of which might sound familiar to any “Game of Thrones” fan. And Ms. Le Guin worked out all the details of a school for wizards when J. K. Rowling was 3 years old.

This early work was done at the margins of the culture. “A Wizard of Earthsea” (196, now regarded as one of the great fantasies of the era, was published by a small press in Berkeley, Calif. “The Left Hand of Darkness” (1969), probably her most influential work, was issued as a 95-cent mass-market paperback.

“I published as a genre writer when genre was not literature,” she said. “I paid the price, you could say. Don DeLillo, who comes off as literary without question, takes the award over me” — at the 1985 National Book Awards — “because I published in genre and he didn’t. Also, he’s a man and I’m a woman.” (Mr. DeLillo won for “White Noise”; her book, “Always Coming Home,” was about a far-future California utopia.)

Mellowing with age is clearly not Ms. Le Guin’s style. In 2014, she received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She spent six months writing her six-minute speech.

“Who was I to spit in the publishers’ punch bowl at the annual industry party?” she recounts in “Words Are My Matter,” a collection of nonfiction appearing this fall from Small Beer Press. “Well, I was, in fact, the one to do it. So I did it.”

She used her speech to decry “commodity profiteers” who sold writers “like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.” She criticized our “obsessive technologies” that promote fear and greed.

The speech, and her outrage, went viral. “A writer in her mid-80s simply has less to lose,” she said. “An author in midcareer who defies the hegemony of Google and Amazon, and names their immoral or unfair practices as such, takes an immediate risk of vengeance from them and of enmity from fellow writers who are cozy with them. I’m taking the same risks, but what the hell. My work is out there — visible, existent.”

Many younger writers cite Ms. Le Guin as an inspiration, including David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman. In an email, Junot Díaz talked about “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” Ms. Le Guin’s parable about a society whose happy existence depends on keeping one small child locked away in misery. Most citizens of Omelas accept that deal. A few do not.

“That story is both a call and a practice for Le Guin,” Mr. Diaz said. “She has spent all these decades trying to chart a path for those who wish to walk away from Omelas — also known as the horror of our civilization.”

“The Complete Orsinia” is Ms. Le Guin in a quieter key. “The editorial challenge of the Library of America is to strike a balance,” said Max Rudin, the library’s publisher. “On the one hand to publish writers and works that are indisputably part of the American canon, and on the other hand to publish books that stretch people’s imagination of what great American writing is.”

In the introduction, she quotes from a 1975 notebook in which she wrote that much of her work was concerned with one central notion: “True pilgrimage consists in coming home.” The hero of “Malafrena” must leave his provincial farm only to find it again.

“There’s a difference between the circle and the spiral,” Ms. Le Guin said. “We say the Earth has a circular orbit around the sun, but of course it doesn’t. You never come back to the same place, you just come back to the same point on the spiral. That image is very deep in my thinking.”

“Orsinia” has another spiral: As Ms. Le Guin’s works are being put in the canon, she has largely stopped writing. “The fiction isn’t coming. You can’t get water from a dry well.” She still writes poetry, which is a consolation.

There remains that other big legacy-cementing possibility. Last year, Ms. Le Guin was given Nobel odds of 25-1. Her conclusion: “All I have to do in the next 25 years is outlive the other 24 writers.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 29, 2016, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ursula Le Guin Has Earned a Rare Honor. on Her Terms.

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