- Born
- 24 August 1915Chicago, USA
- Died
- 19 May 1987McLean, Virginia, USA · aged 71
James Tiptree Jr.
A science-fiction writer whose male pen name unsettled assumptions about gender and authorship.
Alice Bradley Sheldon was born in Chicago in 1915. Childhood travel with her parents was followed by work in art, military intelligence and the CIA. She later trained as a psychologist, completing her doctorate in 1967.
That year she began submitting stories as James Tiptree Jr., a name inspired by a jar of jam. Publication followed in 1968. The fiction explored power, desire and the limits placed on women, often through encounters with unfamiliar bodies or societies. “The Women Men Don’t See” and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” became central works in her reputation.
Many colleagues assumed that Tiptree was a man. The revelation in the late 1970s that the writer was Sheldon exposed the confidence with which readers had treated style as evidence of gender. Her letters also reveal a powerful attraction to women, alongside two marriages to men.
In 1987 Sheldon killed her husband and then herself at their home in Virginia. The literary award established in her pen name in 1991 honoured writing that explores gender. Renamed the Otherwise Award in 2019, it also prompted renewed debate about how to remember her life.