PORTLAND, Ore. — If you’re a big-deal American writer, you hope for a couple of things to cement your legacy. Finding out one fine October morning that your presence is being requested in Sweden would be ideal. Almost as good is enshrinement in the Library of America, the closest thing to immortality between hardcovers.

The Library of America usually restricts itself to Melville, Twain, Hawthorne and the other distinguished dead. But a handful of times it has been so sure of a novelist’s importance that its austere black volumes started appearing while the writer was still alive. Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth got the call.

Ursula K. Le Guin is now on this very shortlist. The library’s original idea was to begin with some of her classic science fiction. But she pressed it to start instead with a volume of her lesser-known work.

“There’s some innate arrogance here: I want to do it my way,” Ms. Le Guin said in an interview at her home here. “I don’t want to be reduced to being ‘the sci-fi writer.’ People are always trying to push me off the literary scene, and to hell with it.”