In the late '60s, Herman Schein, her mother's publisher at Parnassus Press, approached Le Guin about writing a young-adult novel. "A Wizard of Earthsea," which won the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award, came out in 1968, followed closely by 1970's "The Tombs of Atuan," winner of the Newbery Silver Medal, and 1972's "The Farthest Shore," which won the National Book Award for Children's Books. On the surface these are coming-of-age stories, each featuring an adolescent who struggles to learn life's lessons and set in a fairy tale, pre-industrial, vaguely medieval world. But Le Guin's artful storytelling and complex underlying themes elevate the works beyond mundane fantasy and the young-adult audience for which they are intended. "To light a candle is to cast a shadow," one of the wise characters says, and the protagonists spend the rest of their journey learning the need for balance -- light/dark, male/female, action/inaction.

At the time I read it, I didn't notice Earthsea's distinctly male bias. Nearly all fantasy fiction, from C.S. Lewis' "Narnia" to J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," featured male protagonists. Le Guin acknowledges, "That's how hero stories worked." She started on a fourth book in the mid-'70s to correct the imbalance, but put it aside. "Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea" finally appeared in 1990 and won the Nebula. In this story Le Guin shows the underside of Earthsea from the point of view of a mature woman and a battered girl. Although billed as the last book of the series, Le Guin has a collection, "Tales of Earthsea," coming out in the spring. "I thought after 'Tehanu' the story was finished, but I was wrong. I've learned never to say 'never.'"

Le Guin writes a loving homage to Taoism in her most recent Hainish book, 2000's "The Telling," again using the future as metaphor. "In China they've been practicing Taoism for two or three thousand years and apparently nearly wiped it out in only 20 years under Mao," she says. "It survives only in Taiwan and a few little exile colonies in North America. This whole thing haunted my imagination. It was a very hard book to write. I was playing with things that sort of scare me about our world."

The Taoist theory of inaction, that people should take action only when necessary, is shown best in "The Lathe of Heaven" (1972), in which Le Guin creates Everyman George Orr, who can do what we all wish we could -- make dreams real. But Orr falls under the control of a do-gooder psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, who realizes that Orr can change reality and tries to control those "effective dreams" to make the world better. These efforts lurch from inconvenience (no rain) to disaster (an alien invasion), an object lesson in unintended consequences for those who want to change the world.

Le Guin consulted on a 1980 PBS made-for-TV movie version of "Lathe" and chronicled her adventure in "Working on 'The Lathe.'" When David Loxton of the TV lab at WNET called and said he wanted to come to Portland and talk to her about making a TV movie of one of her books, she replied, "No you don't!" Loxton persevered, overcoming Le Guin's objections one by one: He could indeed fly all the way to Oregon and, yes, they could "melt" Portland, "especially if we film that bit in Dallas."

Le Guin admits to a certain amount of calculation in including an interracial relationship in "Lathe." "If you look at my books, you'll find that most of my central characters aren't white. You don't see it on the cover, because they refuse to put people of color on book jackets. But I've always done that deliberately because most people in the world aren't white. Why in the future would we assume they are?"

Regionalism is the most recent influence on Le Guin's work. After her second sabbatical in England, she looked around her Oregon home and made a commitment to "my dirt," shedding the last vestiges of what she calls "Europe-centeredness." She joyously returned to the anthropology and Native American tales of her childhood in the Napa Valley in her second utopian novel, "Always Coming Home" (1985), winner of the Kafka Prize for Fiction and short-listed for the National Book Award.

In this novel, Le Guin tries to "make a world that is a little less cruel and hard on the people who live in it than our world is." The book is remarkable for its structure and its content. Le Guin abandons the traditional narrative form and creates a fictional anthropology of a people far in the future, the Kesh, who have adopted a distinctly Native American way of life. Our dysfunctional historical era is referred to as "the time when people lived outside the world." It's a remarkably rich collection of short stories, myths, poems and music, held together by a central novella and explained by more traditional anthropological "back matter." In this work Le Guin brings together all her passions -- the balance of Taoism, an anarchic "feminine" style, environmentalism and great storytelling.

While chronicling her life and work, I realized my relationship with Le Guin has shifted through the years. I started as a reader inspired by her stories and her insight into the human condition, and I finish as a writer inspired by her artistry, style and continual innovation. I am not unique in feeling this connection to Le Guin's work.

"Boy, it makes you feel fairly humble and it's a little scary when you realize you influence people. But when I'm writing, nothing affects me, I'm just trying to do the story," Le Guin says. And as she has explained, "These are human stories. I'm using the other worlds and the other races as metaphors. All I know how to write about are people and animals -- and trees. Still, nothing that is alien."

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