Ursula K. Le Guin's first novels—set on alien planets and published as trashy head-to-toe double paperbacks by Ace Books—were first unleashed almost half a century ago, in 1966. She was 36. Two years later she published A Wizard of Earthsea, the defining and enduring classic of the genre of wizards going to wizard school. The Left Hand of Darkness, the book that forced writers everywhere to examine how they wrote gender, was first published the very next year and became one of the most acclaimed books of the last century.
She published a dozen books in that first decade, a pile of words built up largely during her thirties that, once released, changed the American conversation about fiction. She is the reigning queen of writing about "the nature of human nature," as Margaret Atwood once described it, in regards to Le Guin's "Ekumen" series. Le Guin is one of the rare authors to have twice taken the Hugo and the Nebula awards in the same year. She published three stories in the New Yorker in 1982 alone.
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