ジェイムズ・ティプトリーJr.の伝記が出版

タイトルは"JAMES TIPTREE, JR. The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" ASIN:0312203853。著者はJulie Phillips。New York TimesやSalonに書評が出ている。

Sheldon and her mother were very much alike -- but not exactly, and that difference seems to have been the source of her lifelong feeling of never quite coming into focus. As a little girl, she was the star of several children's books her mother wrote about their travels in Africa and Asia, books that featured Alice's own delightful illustrations. As a stylish debutante, she was photographed by admiring society journalists. Then she eloped with a bad-boy poet to live the boho life of a painter in 1930s California. Six stormy years of marriage ended in divorce, whereupon Sheldon joined the Army as one of the first WACs. She got into the burgeoning intelligence field known as photointerpretation (studying aerial reconnaissance photographs for enemy installations and activity). Stationed in Paris, she challenged an Army colonel to a game of chess, played blindfolded, beat him and shortly thereafter married him.

With her new husband, Huntington "Ting" Sheldon, Alice returned to the U.S. and the couple spent a few quiet years running (of all things) a chicken hatchery in New Jersey. In the 1950s, they moved to Washington to work for the CIA. Ting ranked high enough to sit in on National Security Council meetings with the president, but Alice soon got tired of photointerpretation and went back to school to study clinical psychology. She eventually earned her Ph.D., studying the effect of novelty on lab rats, and struck up a lifelong correspondence with the great psychologist Rudolf Arnheim.

Sheldon was a charismatic correspondent. (Under her own name she wrote fan letters to mainstream writers like Tom Wolfe and Italo Calvino; Calvino was so impressed he wrote back asking to see her stories, but she never responded.) Those who exchanged letters with Tiptree felt they really knew him, and both Russ and Le Guin have confessed to being more than a little in love with him. "Tiptree was a man designed by a woman," Phillips writes, "and that made him as appealing as any Darcy or Heathcliff."