Within five years of the beginning of his collaboration with Rizzoli, Alcorn began to feel as if he had exhausted the creative challenges and professional opportunities Italy had to offer. Feeling restless once again and ready for a change, he moved the family back to the United States in 1977, settling in Cold Spring, New York. Thus began an exciting new period of freelance work that resulted in a body of work that to this day remains unrivaled in its stylistic and thematic variety.

Throughout the 1980s, he continued to work in the realm of book publishing, designing book jackets and illustrations for various publishing houses, including Atheneum, Doubleday, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Knopf, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Simon & Schuster, Random House and Weidenfeld and Nicolson. In a monumental series of highly communicative book jackets, album covers and posters from this period, the artist achieved a masterful integration of type and image.

In 1982 he started a long and fruitful collaboration with the Italian magazine Prometeo. The idea for a new monthly published by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, and designed completely by John Alcorn, came about as early as 1980, when Alcorn carried out numerous drafts for the graphic layout of a publication that was to be named Il Mensile. However, the project never got off the ground, and he picked it up again two years later for Prometeo, a quarterly science and history journal. In addition to the masthead and the internal graphic design, Alcorn also designed all the front covers until his death in January 1992, when his son, Stephen, was invited to pick up the mantle. The thematic variety of the magazine allowed Alcorn to dip into his ample output from previous decades, judiciously culling illustrations which he then reinterpreted in fresh, new ways.

In 1983 Alcorn and his wife moved to Hamburg Covein Lyme, Connecticut, where they could lead a meditative life close to the sea and the garden. Among his last commissions were three new children’s books, which were interrupted by his death on 27 January 1992, at the age of fifty-six.