In February 1967, Alice got her doctorate in experimental psychology. That spring, she typed up and submitted a few science fiction stories. To protect her academic reputation, she submitted the stories under a pseudonym she and Ting took from a jam jar: James Tiptree Jr.
When the stories sold, Tiptree wrote more. He began corresponding with other writers: Philip K. Dick, Damon Knight, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and especially Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin.
Two years later Alice wrote a friend, the psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, that she was no longer researching or teaching.
"'I really totally dropped out. Like a hopeless drunkard whose last virtue is to manage a clean shirt-collar, all I have done is punctiliously to send out reprints of my articles when requested. [...] But Rudy, it's been such fun. How many times in one's life does a door open to total escape, utter newness? I was so profoundly dispirited, alienated [....] And suddenly I was in the middle of a different light, a new me, first having a good joke of being someone else, and then as the stories went on and out, having started genuine friendships among delightful people whose native language—crude, childish, humourous—rational—was mine...'"
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In 1977, the year Tiptree's identity was revealed, Alice Sheldon posed for her first author photo.
Alli and Ting photographed by Patti Perret, 1985.
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