After returning to the United States, he worked for a time as an assistant editor at Vanity Fair magazine in New York City.
When his studies were interrupted by a bout of tuberculosis, Seager returned to the US to spend a year "curing" at the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in Saranac Lake, New York.
After his return to the United States from England, Seager worked for Vanity Fair magazine in New York City for a time as an assistant editor.
Seager published more than 80 short stories in such leading magazines as The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic, and Sports Illustrated.
Seager drew from his time at the Saranac Lake sanitarium, undergraduate years in Ann Arbor and at Oxford for the semi-autobiographical short stories he published that were collected in A Frieze of Girls (1964).
[2] While living in Seattle and teaching at the University of Washington, in the spring of 1963 Theodore Roethke introduced his friend Seager by telephone to poet and novelist James Dickey, who was in the city for a reading.