After graduation Alther worked briefly for Atheneum Publishers in New York before moving to rural Vermont.
Alther wrote fiction steadily for years, without success, collecting more than 250 rejection slips without getting published.
[5] Alther is the author of six contemporary novels, Kinflicks, Original Sins, Other Women, Bedrock, Five Minutes In Heaven, and Swan Song, as well as a small number of published short stories and many magazine articles.
She also wrote Washed in the Blood, a three-part historical novel concerning the earliest European settlement of the southern Appalachians.
Alther has taught Southern fiction at Saint Michael's College in Winooski, Vermont, and at East Tennessee State University, where she was awarded the Basler Chair.