In Le Guin's book-writing process, the story always came to her through a character rather than an event, idea, plot, or society. The story behind The Dispossessed first occurred to Le Guin through a vision, revealed as if seen from a distance, first as a male physicist, his thin face, clear eyes, large ears, possibly recalling a memory of Robert Oppenheimer, and a vivid personality.[34] She attempted to capture the character in a short story in what she recalled as one of her worst in 30 years of writing, in which the physicist escapes a gulag planet for a nearby wealthy sister planet, where he has a love affair but likes the planet even less, and so nobly returns to the gulag. She proceeded to rewrite the story, beginning with his name and origin—Shevek, from Utopia—which she considered reasonable based on his intelligence and disarming naivety. Knowing only bits of Thomas More (Utopia), William Morris (News from Nowhere), William Henry Hudson (A Crystal Age), and H. G. Wells (A Modern Utopia), Le Guin's reading of modern libertarian socialists rounded Shevek's prison planet into a place where she saw he would want to return: Marx and Engels, William Godwin, Emma Goldman, Paul Goodman and, foremost, Peter Kropotkin and Mary Shelley.[35]
Le Guin wrote The Dispossessed in 1973 for publication in May[36] or June 1974.[37]
