Ursula Kroeber married historian Charles A. Le Guin in Paris on September 22, 1953, adopting the surname 'Le Guin' under which she would publish.
On September 22, 1953, Ursula Kroeber married Charles A. Le Guin, a fellow Fulbright scholar and historian, while she was studying in Paris. The couple had met aboard the ship Queen Mary en route to Europe, where Ursula was pursuing graduate studies on French and Italian Renaissance literature after completing her master's degree at Columbia University.
Their marriage was a partnership of mutual intellectual respect that lasted until her death in 2018—65 years. Charles Le Guin went on to become a history professor at Portland State University, and the couple settled in Portland, Oregon, where they raised three children: Elisabeth, Caroline, and Theodore.
This marriage is historically significant because it gave Ursula the surname under which she would publish virtually all of her acclaimed work—Ursula K. Le Guin—and provided the stable domestic foundation from which she built her extraordinary literary career while managing the demands of motherhood in an era when professional writing careers for women were often curtailed by domestic expectations. She often spoke of the challenge and reward of balancing writing with raising children in mid-20th-century America, and her marriage represented a rare model of egalitarian partnership for the period.