Joining the likes of the Pittock Mansion, the Hollywood Theatre, the home of poet Hazel Hall, Camp Namanu, the Albers Brothers Milling complex, and the Memorial Coliseum, the longtime home of legendary writer Ursula K. Le Guin has claimed a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. The nomination, advanced in February by Oregon’s State Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation and approved June 17, notes the home’s “national significance in the areas of literature and women’s social history.”
Born to anthropologist parents in Berkeley, California, in 1929 (the same year as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Anne Frank, and Audrey Hepburn), Le Guin lived most of her adult life at 3321 NW Thurman St, raising three children there with husband Charles Le Guin. After the children were in bed, either asleep or settled with a book to read, she would spend a few hours working on such now-classics as A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness.
She settled into the former nursery as her writing space, a corner room with a red-framed window on the second floor of the home, built in 1899 from a Sears & Roebuck catalog plan. The couple’s bedroom window offered a view of Mount St. Helens, and in 1980 she watched “the incredible column of dust and ash rising thousands of feet (though it seemed almost immobile) over a blur of haze where the mountain had been.”
While Le Guin is best known for her science fiction, she also wrote essays, poems, and children’s books (and about cats). She was known, too, for being outspoken, notably at the 2014 National Book Awards, where she denounced Amazon and even her own publishers for ignorance and greed.
Le Guin died in 2018, at age 88. In 2024, her family donated the home to Portland nonprofit Literary Arts to help create a writer’s residency in her honor, set to launch next year.
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