Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929, the youngest of four children and the only daughter of Alfred Louis and Theodora Kracaw Brown Kroeber. Her father was a renowned professor of anthropology, an expert on California Indians; her mother was an author in her own right, with several children's books published by Parnassus Press, but best known for Ishi in Two Worlds (1961), the biography of the last "wild" Indian in North America. Le Guin grew up in Berkeley in a secure and intellectually stimulating environment. Her parents were progressive and nonsexist in raising children. The house was filled with books, and her father was frequently visited by major figures in anthropology and other fields. She claims that her parents' careers in anthropology strongly influenced her writing: "My father studied real cultures and I make them up--in a way, it's the same thing."
As a child, Le Guin wanted to be a biologist and a poet. She read widely as a youngster, preferring Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890), Norse myths, and science-fiction magazines, though she temporarily lost interest in science fiction as she matured.
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