Cats were community to Ursula K. Le Guin. The beloved author, perhaps best known for her influential speculative fiction such as the Hainish cycle and The Lathe of Heaven, also possessed an earthbound obsession and abiding affection for the nearly two dozen felines she raised, nurtured, and befriended throughout her life.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats
In the recently published Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats, Library of America collects a lion’s share of poems, cartoons, and prose pieces that invites readers to explore a little-known side of this visionary writer who found herself entranced by the whimsical mystery of her furry, whiskered creatures.
Below, we present mini-biographies of Le Guin’s many cats, beginning with her childhood companions in the 1930s and extending all the way to Pardo, the tuxedo kitten she adopted in 2011. Accompanying these profiles in purr-age are a number of illustrations by Le Guin (with coloring by Isabel Urbina Peña) that show the humor, imagination, and care she brought to her relationships with animals, as well as excerpts from several of her inimitable cat poems—a gift to fellow ailurophiles, and a window into the heart and mind of this category-defying American voice.
All illustrations © 2025 by The Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust.
ANON, TICKIE, NERO, AND FIGARO (c. 1930–1940)
Photos from Ursula’s first decade suggest that cats were part of her life from the time she could walk. It seems they may have been residents of Kishamish, the farmhouse where the Kroeber family spent each summer from 1930 onward; old albums show Ursula from about age two to nine petting and holding different kittens and cats there, some of whose names are labeled and all of whom look possibly related, since they are all either black or black-and-white shorthairs—perhaps establishing the roots of her partiality for tuxedos.
PIFFLE (c. 1940–1947)
Sharp ears, short legs, as big, strong and grey as a battleship. He was dignified, but lived most of his life in the kitchen and ate as much food as you would give him, provided that he liked it. Carried on his duels of honor on the back lawn; he made love, however, for blocks around. He had no sense of humor, but he was a gentleman.
From “The Cat”
He walks upon his paws
To the places that he goes,
Followed by his tail
And preceded by his nose.
GASPAR (1952–c. 1954)
A playful and insouciant longhair gray tabby, Gaspar seems to have been the cat Ursula reluctantly left behind in Berkeley with her parents when she headed to France, where she would soon meet Charles, her husband, and begin a new life, with (soon) new cats.
ANONYMOUS ILL-FATED KITTEN, AKA “CATFOOD” (c. 1959, LESS THAN A YEAR)
Tabby kitten, of uncertain origins, infested with fleas. (First Portland household cat! Tremendous excitement!) Elisabeth, age two, dissuaded from giving it the sublime name of Catfood, surely not for aesthetic reasons but because there was some doubt as to whether it would live. Indeed it didn’t for very long. (A flying-kitten experiment, undertaken off the back verandah, probably did not help.)
TOM AND TABBY (EARLY TO MID–1960s)
The first generation of “Bates Cats,” named for family friends who raised large, dignified, long-haired orange cats. Tom was indeed a tomcat, prone to fighting and abscessed ears and spraying to mark his territory; Tabby was a momma cat. They lived largely outside, being put out at night and allowed back inside in the morning through a clattery cat door Charles cut into the back porch. Both retired to country life when the family was away from home for a year.
LAUREL (c. 1965–c. 1973)
A large long-haired marmalade gentleman; elegant, independent, and affectionate. Ursula’s daughter Caroline wanted to name him Pinky, for his pink paw pads; this was vetoed by Ursula, who suggested the comic actor duo as namesakes for both Laurel and his brother Hardy, who was the darker orange and stockier of the two. Both were second generation “Bates” cats and like their uncle Tom, they were prone to spraying, much to Charles’s ire (“damn cats”).
From “Raksha”
Piercing eyes. Demonic. Scruffy, longhaired,
black. All black. Hisses, spits, and runs away.
HARDY (c. 1965–1970)
Hardy was a fine specimen of ginger catness, robust, the swirls of his long tabby coat a vivid dark orange. He took his territorial duties seriously, often going out on patrol, and sometimes suffered injuries in the line of duty.
NEKO (c. 1970–c. 1988)
A muddled grey-orange tortoiseshell, Neko may have been the original ballooncat. She had a large round body, a small head, small feet, small tail, and a small squeaky meow. Ursula said of her that she lacked tact—she had a way of gracelessly and clumsily inserting herself onto laps, beds, and underfoot. The longest-lived of all the Le Guin cats and perhaps the least charismatic, outliving several stronger characters, until one day at eighteen she simply disappeared—returned to her people, it was said.
LEONARD (1974–c. 1988)
A long-haired black-and white kitten, lost and bewildered in the hullabaloo of the Portland Rose Parade, rescued and named by Dorothy Hirsch, Elisabeth’s best friend at
school. Leonard moved into the Thurman Street house as to the manor born and enjoyed a long reign. When not occupied with the many pressing concerns of the nobility, he made contributions to science, notably inspiring Ursula’s Theory of Feline Gravitational Conservation: the mass conserved by an ascending feline (viz., feather-light arrival of fourteen pound animal on kitchen counter) is doubled upon its descent (viz., leaden thump, as of twenty-eight-pound sandbag, when obliged by cook to jump off said counter).
MISS MOPPET (1978–1979)
Tiny, beautiful, and doomed, Miss Moppet immigrated from Napa Valley to Portland and lived scarcely a year, breaking the hearts of all.
From “Grace”
The kitten no bigger than a teacup growls
true threat at interference with his food,
will bite the hand that feeds him, and draw blood
PHILIP (1979–c. 1993)
Handsome, kind, heroic in profile, but a bit of a dim bulb compared to his smaller brother Lorenzo. Many royal families have this fraternal juxtaposition—the noble and dignified elder, destined to rule or die young, and the scamp who manages to steal the limelight and avoid duty.
LORENZO, AKA BONZO (1979–c. 1996)
A small neat classic tabby, with small white paws and a white nose, littermate of Philip, and generational relation to Miss Moppet—all three the kittens of Mother Courage, the partly tame momma cat who raised her litters under the house at Kishamish in Napa Valley for several summers. Lorenzo was almost not adopted (Philip had already been selected), but Caroline insisted with tears he too must join the family, leading to the era of a four-cat house. Lorenzo’s intelligence, wit, and self-possession soon charmed and mastered all inhabitants of the house, Charles included.
ARCHIE AND WILLIE (c. 1997–1998)
After the end of the four-cat era, two pale-orange and white little brothers came into the household as sickly kittens already infected with feline leukemia. For their too-short lives they were loved and nursed and worried over by Ursula and by Charles, who was continuing his journey to becoming a cat person.
ZORRO (LATE 1998–2011)
After Willie died, Ursula asked her vet to let her know if anybody left a kitten at the veterinary door. The next morning the vet called: Zorro had been left on her doorstep. Zorro always wore a tuxedo. He was a great mouser, but more detective than killer; most of the mice were left, if not entirely intact, at least alive. His tail was a great asset to interspecies communication. Long for his size, with it he expressed emotions, dissatisfactions, and needs quite eloquently without resorting to vocalization.
PARDO, AKA PARD (2011–PRESENT)
At the Humane Society, Pard chose Ursula. Another tuxedo wearer, pretty according to Ursula, with eyes of alexandrite, changing color according to the angle of the light. As his arrival coincided with the early days of Ursula’s blog, much ink was spilled in chronicling his early life. Persistent, curious, and buoyant, Pard is adept in door-opening, vase-overturning, and improbably high surface visitation. He was always most comfortable with Ursula but has proven himself adaptable in upper-middle age. Though skittish of most people and especially men early on, he spent a good part of his middle age on the lap of Charles (completing Charles’s journey to becoming a cat person). Like Zorro, a great hunter but unable to make the kill. As Ursula wrote, “his instincts and skills are impeccably feline, but his education was incomplete.
From “Nine Lines, August 9”
The cat on his concealed switchblade toes
comes by, and what he says
is silent, but enlightening.
