She was born in
1915, had a
PhD in
psychology, worked for
the Pentagon, and first published
science fiction in
1968. The
pseudonym led to a comment by (if I remember correctly)
Damon Knight sometime in the early
1970s that all the good new science fiction
writers were
women except for James Tiptree, Jr. It wasn't until
1977 that her true
identity was revealed. (It seems odd, though, that it took this long, since much of her work was intensely
feminist, and my dad recalls reading the
Nebula-award winning "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" and thinking it was an odd thing to have been written by a
man.)
She committed suicide in 1987 after shooting her Alzheimer's disease-afflicted husband.