Sallie Bingham

Sallie Bingham
Bingham at a reading for Red Car, 2010
Bingham at a reading for Red Car, 2010
Born(1937-01-22)January 22, 1937
Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.
DiedAugust 6, 2025(2025-08-06) (aged 88)
Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.
OccupationWriter
Alma materRadcliffe College
GenreShort story, novel, poetry, drama, memoir
RelativesBarry Bingham Sr. (father)

Sarah Montague "Sallie" Bingham (January 22, 1937 – August 6, 2025) was an American author, playwright, poet, teacher, feminist activist and philanthropist. She was the eldest daughter of Barry Bingham Sr., patriarch of the Bingham family of Louisville, Kentucky.

Career

Sallie Bingham's first novel, After Such Knowledge, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1960. It was followed by six collections of short stories; her latest, to be published in September 2025 by Turtle Point Press, is titled How Daddy Lost His Ear: And Other Stories. She also published six additional novels, three collections of poetry, numerous plays (produced off-Broadway and regionally), and two family memoirs, Passion and Prejudice (Knopf, 1989) and ‘’Little Brother (Sarabande Books, 2022).

Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, New Letters, Plainswoman, Plainsong, Greensboro Review, Negative Capability, The Connecticut Review, and Southwest Review, among others, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Forty Best Stories from Mademoiselle,[1] Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and The Harvard Advocate Centennial Anthology. She received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Bingham worked as a book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville and was a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She was the founder of the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which published The American Voice, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University.

In the 1980s, Bingham sat on the board of newspaper company run by her family, whose publications included The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times.[2] Dissatisfied with how the company treated women and racial minorities who worked there, her internal pressures and other political activity brought her into direct conflict with her brother, Barry Bingham Jr., who by then led the board.[2] Barry Bingham eventually expelled all family members from the board, but Sallie Bingham responded by putting her shares up for public sale, which eventually led the Bingham family to divest entirely from the newspaper business in 1986, selling the company.[2]

Personal life and death

Born Sarah Montague Bingham in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 22, 1937, Bingham was married three times: to publisher A. Whitney Ellsworth, attorney Michael Iovenko, and contractor Tim Peters.[2] She had three sons—film producer Barry Ellsworth, William Iovenko, and writer Christopher Iovenko—and five grandchildren.

Bingham died from a stroke at her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on August 6, 2025, at the age of 88.[2]

Bibliography

Memoir
  • Passion and Prejudice (Knopf, 1989)
  • The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters (Sarabande Books, 2014)
  • Little Brother: A Memoir (Sarabande Books, 2022)
Short stories
  • The Touching Hand (Houghton Mifflin, 1967)
  • The Way It Is Now (Viking Press, 1972)
  • Transgressions (Sarabande Books, 2002)
  • Red Car (Sarabande Books, 2008)
  • Mending: New and Selected Stories (Sarabande Books, 2011)
  • How Daddy Lost His Ear: And Other Stories (Turtle Point Press, 2025)
Novels
  • After Such Knowledge (Houghton Mifflin, 1960)
  • Small Victories (Zoland Books, 1992)
  • Upstate (Permanent Press, 1993)
  • Matron of Honor (Zoland Books, 1994)
  • Straight Man (Zoland Books, 1996)
  • Cory's Feast (Sunstone Press, 2005)
  • Nick of Time (Sunstone Press, 2007)
  • Taken by the Shawnee (Turtle Point Press, 2024)
Poetry
  • The High Cost of Denying Rivers Their Floodplain (privately published, 1995)
  • The Hub of the Miracle (Sunstone Press, 2006)
  • If in Darkness (Tebot Bach, 2010)
Plays
  • Milk of Paradise, two children adrift in a confusing world of distracted adults and too much poetry (The Women's Project and Productions, NY, 1980)
  • Couvade, a one-man show in which the actor gives birth on stage (Actors Theatre, Louisville, KY, 1981)
  • Paducah, a comedy about a love triangle in a small Kentucky town, in which the two women become best friends (The Women's Project and Productions, NY, 1983)
  • In the Presence, based on The Wall Between by renowned civil rights worker Anne McCarty Braden (Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, 1984; Mill Mountain Theatre, Roanoke, VA, 1986)
  • Hopscotch, the history of four well-known Kentucky women, including the truths that are often left out (Horse Cave Theater, KY, 1986)
  • The Awakening, an adaptation of the novel by Kate Chopin (Horse Cave Theater, KY, 1988)
  • Treason, about how Ezra Pound betrayed the three women who loved him while on trial for betraying his country (Perry Street Theatre, NY, 2006)
  • A Dangerous Personality, about the renowned mystic and founder of Theosophy, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (The Women's Project, NY, 2008)
Anthologies
  • Best American Short Stories: 1959, eds. Martha Foley and David Burnett (Houghton Mifflin, 1959)
  • 40 Best Stories from Mademoiselle, 1935–1960, eds. Cyrilly Abels and Margarita G. Smith (Gollancz, 1960)
  • The Harvard Advocate Centennial Anthology, ed. Jonathan D. Culler (Shenkman Books, 1966)
  • Identity: Stories for this Generation, ed. Katherine Hondius (Scott, Foresman and Co., 1966)
  • Prize Stories 1966: The O. Henry Awards, eds. Richard Poirier and William Miller Abrahams (Doubleday, 1966)
  • Solo: Women on Woman Alone, eds. Linda Hamalian and Leo Hamalian (Delacorte Press, 1977)
  • Here's the Story: Fiction with Heart, ed. Morty Sklar (The Spirit That Moves Us Press, 1985)
  • American Wives: 30 Short Stories by Women, ed. Barbara Solomon (Signet, 1987)
  • New Stories by Southern Women, ed. Mary Ellis Gibson (University of South Carolina Press, 1989)
  • Playwriting Women: 7 Plays from the Women's Project and Productions, ed. Julia Miles (Heinemann Drama, 1993)
  • Home and Beyond: An Anthology of Kentucky Short Stories, ed. Morris A. Grubbs (The University Press of Kentucky, 2001)
  • I to I, Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists, eds. Elizabeth Oakes and Jane Olmsted (Western Kentucky University, 2004)
  • The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State, ed. Wade Hall (University Press of Kentucky, 2005)
  • Imagine What It's Like, A Literature and Medicine Anthology, ed. Ruth L. Nadelhaft (University of Hawaii Press, 2008)
  • World Premieres from Horse Cave: Plays by Kentucky Writers, eds. Liz Bussey Fentress and Warren Hammack (MotesBooks, 2009)
  • Treason: A Sallie Bingham Reader (Sarabande Books, 2020)

Nonfiction

  • The Blue Box (Sarabande Books, 2014)
  • The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)

References

  1. ^ Abels, Cyrilly; Smith, Margarita G., eds. (1960). 40 Best Stories from Mademoiselle, 1935-1960. London: Victor Gollancz. p. 456.
  2. ^ a b c d e Gates, Anita (August 7, 2025). "Sallie Bingham, Author at the Center of a Newspaper Drama, Dies at 88". The New York Times. Retrieved August 7, 2025.
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