Ursula K. Le Guin is a writer of great versatility and power, acclaimed for her science fiction, fantasy, and children's literature. All her fiction is distinguished by careful craftsmanship, a limpid prose style, realistic detail in the creation of imaginary worlds, profound ethical concerns, and mythical reverberations created through the use of symbolic and archetypal patterns. Her typical story involves a hero's quest for maturity and psychological integration, and her major theme is the need for balance and wholeness. She is best known for the Earthsea trilogy (A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968; The Tombs of Atuan , 1971; The Farthest Shore, 1972), three novels concerning the career of the Wizard Ged in an imaginary land called Earthsea. The award-winning fantasy trilogy has been frequently and favorably compared with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis's Narnia series. In her critical essays, collected in The Language of the Night (1979), Le Guin...