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It was common in the 19th century for a woman to adopt a male nom de plume in order to be taken more seriously as a writer or to preserve her privacy. By the 20th century, though, women had come into their own in literary terms, and a practice that had well served such writers as George Eliot, George Sand and the Bront‘s became passŽ. So it was surprising in the late 1970s when acclaimed science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., was outed as a woman, not least of all because Tiptree had been heralded as a notably masculine writer, albeit one who played fast and lose with gender issues in his stories.

Tiptree, the world learned, was really Alice Bradley Sheldon, a then 60-something woman living a quiet life in the rural exurbs of Washington, D.C. But as Julie Phillips demonstrates in her impressively detailed and engaging biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, much of Sheldon’s earlier life had been anything but quiet. Before becoming a science fiction writer when she was in her 50s, this gifted woman had been a painter, a WAAC officer during World War II, a CIA agent, a research psychologist and even a chicken farmer. Extraordinarily bright and beautiful, Allie Sheldon did many things well, but spent much of her life struggling with identity issues, a struggle that kept her from leaving her mark in any one field until she rediscovered science fiction in middle age.

Reading Phillips’ incisive and sympathetic account of Sheldon’s life, it seems inevitable that this woman would have an unconventional life. She was born to a world of privilege, her father a Chicago lawyer and her mother, Mary Bradley, an extremely successful writer of popular fiction and adventure travel. The Bradleys were atypical by any measure, leading numerous expeditions to the African interior and taking young Alice along with them from the time she was six. A childhood spent hunting elephants and learning Swahili left the girl with a restless sense of adventure that she would never tame, saddling her with aspirations that pushed beyond the circumscribed parameters for women of her generation. More often than not, these unfulfilled aspirations led to frustration and unhappiness.

Sheldon dabbled in colleges Sarah Lawrence, Berkeley, NYU never quite finishing what she began, and at painting, even studying with Ashcan School painter John Sloan. She weathered an impulsive and disastrous early marriage and had strong emotional and casual sexual attachments to a number of women (Phillips suggests that Sheldon’s true sexual disposition was lesbian, but she never had the courage to embrace that life). Twenty-six when America entered World War II, Sheldon enlisted, enjoying her work in the photo intelligence division, and ultimately marrying her boss, Col. Huntington Ting Sheldon. After the war, the Sheldons tried their hands at running a chicken hatchery in New Jersey before returning to Washington where they both took positions with the nascent CIA.

Ting stayed with the Agency, though Allie left after just three years, frustrated by its glass ceiling. She tried a bit of freelance writing, then finally knuckled down academically, earning a Ph.D. in psychology. She ultimately applied her fascination with theories of perception to her fiction, and that fiction, Phillips shows, would borrow heavily from Sheldon’s extraordinary experiences and her lifelong personal conflicts about sexuality and gender roles. In 1987, Sheldon shot Ting while he slept, then turned the gun on herself, carrying out a suicide pact the two had made.

The limited output of James Tiptree, Jr., is not well known outside the world of science fiction, but Phillips’ appealing, authoritative biography is meant for readers well beyond the limits of the genre. Sheldon’s secret identity and the issues she explored in her fiction are interesting, true, but her life story proves fascinating in its own right, unique in its particulars, and emblematic of the constricting reality that intelligent, accomplished women routinely faced before the women’s movement made it possible for them to be masters of their own destiny. Robert Weibezahl is the author of the novel The Wicked and the Dead.

Few authors or journalists probe with more specificity and irony the dynamic of race and class than Lawrence Otis Graham (Member of the Club), who has devoted the bulk of his 13 books to this subject. His newest volume, The Senator and the Socialite, explores the issue in a different time and place, profiling the emergence of the Bruce family, whom Graham correctly touts as the nation’s first black dynasty. Indeed, it’s hard not to imagine a forthcoming Hollywood treatment for this 19th-century family whose social gatherings, international trips and even family births appeared in the society columns of such prominent newspapers as The New York Times and Washington Post during an era when these publications usually didn’t even have black janitorial staff, let alone writers and editors.

Graham crafts an entertaining, intriguing and sometimes amazing story of personal mobility and ambition as he traces Blanche Kelso Bruce’s rise from former Mississippi slave to a career serving under four Republican presidents. Bruce not only married well (his bride was the daughter of a wealthy black doctor), but also befriended the right people, from President Grant and Frederick Douglass to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Booker T. Washington. The impressive rise of the couple leads to enormous wealth and status, with Bruce even having his name printed on U.S. currency through his appointment to a top Treasury Department post.

In the book’s later sections Graham documents a fall that is as staggering and unprecedented as the family’s initial climb to power and fame. The Bruces eventually not only lose material clout, but their reputation as well. Bruce’s grandson gets imprisoned for embezzlement in a trial whose proceedings make the O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson and Robert Blake cases seem fair and orderly by comparison. His granddaughter makes a horrible, embarrassing personal decision, marrying an untalented black actor trying to pass as white.

Though he doesn’t ignore or tone down his descriptions of the devastating changes that affected the Bruce family during the 20th century, Graham takes care to fully evaluate their impact as social movers and shakers for decades. The author clearly views the Bruce family as an inspiration despite their later failings.

Unlike some other Graham books that occasionally veer into tabloid waters, The Senator and the Socialite provides thorough and solid historical detail, political analysis and cultural discussion. Without diluting the prose, downplaying the negatives or weakening the story, Graham presents a vital, previously underreported tale of glory, achievement and eventual disappointment. Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville City Paper and other publications.

In 1932, 11-year-old Margaret Werner arrived in the Soviet Union with her parents Carl and Elisabeth. Faced with the choice of eking out a living in Depression-era Detroit or taking a temporary one-year assignment to work for Ford Motor Company’s new manufacturing plant in Gorky, outside of Moscow, Carl had chosen the latter. The decision proved to be disastrous. Carl was arrested in 1936 by the secret police and never heard from again, leaving his wife and daughter impoverished and struggling to survive. Seven years later, Margaret was arrested for espionage and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor. It would be three painful decades before she was able to come home to the United States.

Margaret’s son Karl Tobien tells her improbable story in Dancing Under the Red Star, maintaining his mother’s 17-year-old voice throughout the book. Tobien describes the unimaginable deprivations, malnutrition and cruelty suffered in Siberian labor camps; the larger context of World War II and the Cold War are hinted at only broadly. (Curiously absent is any discussion of what if anything Ford or the U.S. government did to secure the return of the Werner family.) At its crux, this is Margaret’s story, a prison memoir of survival and faith and undiminished optimism. During her years in the Gulag, Margaret becomes a member of a prison dance troop and finds miracles in the everyday ability to carry on. After her release, Margaret marries a German POW she had met during her internment. Finally allowed to leave for East Germany, the pair, along with their baby son and Elisabeth, takes the opportunity to make an inspired escape to West Germany, and ultimately back to America. Margaret Werner is the only American woman to survive Stalin’s Gulag. Her life, randomly caught in the brutal Soviet regime, is at turns bleak and horrifying. However, it is also a testament to one woman’s unshakable courage and faith. Stacy Perman is a journalist in New York and the author of Spies Inc.: Business Innovation from Israel’s Masters of Espionage (Financial Times/Prentice Hall).