Science-fiction, fantasy, and children's books are wide open to beautiful and imaginative experimentation, especially since the postmodern breakdown of canonical and generic distinctions typified in the allegedly mainstream but strange works of Jorge Luis Borges, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Isabel Allende. Le Guin writes fantasy, science fiction, young-adult fiction, mainstream fiction, nonfiction, short story and novella collections, poetry, screenplays, translations, children's picture books, dances, and whatever else presents itself at the moment as a vehicle for her discoveries. She is not restricted by convention or expectation but writes, as fellow ghetto author Orson Scott Card notes, "what she believes in and cares about . . . and lets us sort ourselves into communities as we respond."
A self-described "California kid," Ursula Kroeber was born 21 October 1929, the fourth child and only daughter of Theodora Kracaw Kroeber and Alfred L. Kroeber. Alfred Kroeber taught anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, and Theodora Kroeber, who had a master's degree in psychology, compiled and popularized Native American stories; she also wrote the biography of Ishi, the last living Yahi Indian, whom the Kroebers had befriended before his death in 1916. The Kroebers provided for a richly imaginative future for their four children, and Ursula set about immediately to fulfill it with a fiercely creative childhood.
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