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,
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. 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. 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. ==Personal life and death==