James Tiptree, Jr. , burst onto the science fiction scene in the late 1960s with a string of hard-edged, provocative stories. He was hailed as a brilliant writer with a deep sympathy for his female characters. He carried on intimate correspondences with other writers, none of whom knew his true identity. He was so reclusive that he was widely believed to be a top-secret government agent. Then the cover was blown--on a sixty-one-year-old woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon. A Chicago native, Alice traveled the globe with her mother, then eloped with a poet at nineteen. She became an artist, a newspaper critic, an army officer, a CIA analyst, and an expert on the psychology of perception. Beautiful, theatrical, and sophisticated, she developed close friendships with people she never met. Devoted to her second husband, she struggled with her feelings for women. An outspoken feminist, she took a male name as a joke, and found the voice to write her stories--only when she became someone else could she tell the truth about herself. --From publisher description.