ANQ, June 22nd, 2003
When Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," first published in 1973, was collected two years later in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Le Guin added an introduction identifying the immediate inspiration for the central image of her story as a passage in William James's "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." Her debt to James had been indicated by the story's subtitle, "Variations on a theme by William James," but Le Guin reported that she had several times been asked why she had not given credit to Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (Le Guin 275). Her response was that she h...
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