During these trips, she played the role of the "perfect daughter, willing to be carried across Africa like a parcel, always neatly dressed and well behaved, a credit to her mother."

These were both travel books for children which included photos of young Alice visiting parts of Africa not yet fully discovered by Westerners.

At the age of ten, she went to the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, which was an experimental teaching workshop with small classes and loose structure.

The same year, a non-fiction piece about Polish refugees working in Germany (entitled "The Lucky Ones") was published in the November 16, 1946 issue of The New Yorker, and credited to "Alice Bradley" in the magazine.

During this time, she wrote and submitted a few science fiction stories under the name James Tiptree Jr., in order to protect her academic reputation.

[10] In 1936, Bradley participated in a group show at the Art Institute of Chicago, to which she had connections through her family, featuring new American work.

[11] In 1939, her nude self-portrait titled Portrait in the Country was accepted for the "All-American" biennial show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C., where it was displayed for six weeks.

While these two shows were considered big breaks, she disparaged these accomplishments, saying that "only second rate painters sold" and she preferred to keep her works at home.

"[15][16] She also made the choice to start writing science fiction she, herself, was interested in and "was surprised to find that her stories were immediately accepted for publication and quickly became popular.

"[5] Her first published short story was "Birth of a Salesman" in the March 1968 issue of Analog Science Fact & Fiction, edited by John W. Campbell.

"[18] Silverberg also likened Tiptree's writing to Ernest Hemingway's, arguing there was a "prevailing masculinity about both of them—that preoccupation with questions of courage, with absolute values, with the mysteries and passions of life and death as revealed by extreme physical tests, by pain and suffering and loss.

Writing was a way to escape a male-dominated society, themes Tiptree explored in the short stories later collected in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

follows a group of astronauts who discover a future Earth whose male population has been wiped out; the remaining females have learned to get along just fine in their absence.

In 1976, "Tiptree" mentioned in a letter that "his" mother, also a writer, had died in Chicago—details that led inquiring fans to find the obituary, with its reference to Alice Sheldon; soon all was revealed.

"Tip" was a crucial part of modern SF's maturing process … "He"… wrote powerful fiction challenging readers' assumptions about everything, especially sex and gender.

We see the two women in the story (Ruth Parsons and her daughter) through the eyes of Don Fenton, who assesses them critically as possible sexual partners and is also concerned to protect them.

He is confused when Ruth shows courage and common sense, failing to "fulfill stereotypical female roles," according to Anne Cranny-Francis.

As Cranny-Francis states, "'The Women Men Don't See' is an outstanding example … of the subversive use of genre fiction to produce an unconventional discursive position, the feminist subject.

In the last years of her life, she suffered from depression and heart trouble, while her husband began to lose his eyesight, becoming almost completely blind in 1986.

[24] In 1976, then 61-year-old Sheldon wrote to Silverberg expressing her desire to end her own life while she was still able-bodied and active; she said that she was reluctant to act upon this intention, as she did not want to leave her husband behind and could not bring herself to kill him.

[28] Although the circumstances surrounding the Sheldons' deaths are not clear enough to rule out caregiver murder–suicide (in that perhaps her husband was not ready to die), testimony of those closest to them suggests a suicide pact.

In 1980 she wrote to Joanna Russ and stated "I am a Lesbian [sic] [...] I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything it was always girls and women who lit me up".

[30][31] Sheldon had affairs with men[32] and "passionate crushes" on women[13] during her first marriage, and later remarked "the 2 or 3 great loves of my life were girls".

[13] The James Tiptree Jr. Award, honoring works of science fiction and fantasy that expand or explore the understanding of gender, was created by authors Karen Joy Fowler and Pat Murphy in February 1991.