Nature, Fantasy and the American West in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea

Abstract

Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley in 1929 and settled in Portland, Oregon, in 1959 after ten years in Europe and on the East Coast. The West thus framed her experiences abroad, and gave shape to much of her writing. Kunzru, writing on Le Guin’s status as a Western American writer, holds that the “coastal tradition looks west to the Pacific, with a wilderness at its back and European or East coast cities very far away”, and quotes Le Guin as saying that she felt “‘very uppity’ about the ‘parochialism and snobbishness’ of the East Coast literary establishment. ‘The idea that everybody lives in a large city in the east, it’s such a strange thing for an American to think’”. Kunzru implies that wild nature and the immensity of the Pacific gave shape to Le Guin’s imaginary worlds.