who build walls are their own prisoners." Publication 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. 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. Le Guin wrote The Dispossessed in 1973 for publication in May or June 1974. Critical reception The novel received generally positive reviews. On the positive side, Baird Searles characterized the novel as an "extraordinary work", saying Le Guin had "created a working society in exquisite detail" and "a fully realized hypothetical culture [as well as] living breathing characters who are inevitable products of that culture". Gerald Jonas, writing in The New York Times, said that "Le Guin's book, written in her solid, no-nonsense prose, is so persuasive that it ought to put a stop to the writing of prescriptive Utopias for at least 10 years". Theodore Sturgeon praised The Dispossessed as "a beautifully written, beautifully composed book", saying "it performs one of [science fiction's] prime functions, which is to create another kind of social system to see how it would work. Or if it would work." Lester del Rey, however, gave the novel a mixed review, citing the quality of Le Guin's writing but claiming that the ending "slips badly", a deus ex machina that "destroy[s] much of the strength of the novel".