Sallie Bingham

Sallie Bingham, the author, playwright, philanthropist, feminist and political activist died on Wednesday at her home in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 88. Her paternal grandfather, John Worth Bingham, bought two newspapers, The Louisville Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times. The money came from John Bingham’s second wife, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler, the widow of an oil and railroad tycoon who died in 1917. Sallie’s first novel was pub­lished by Houghton Mifflin in 1961. It was fol­lowed by four col­lec­tions of short sto­ries; her most recent, from Sarabande Books in 2011, is titled Mending: New and Selected Stories. She has also pub­lished six addi­tional nov­els, three col­lec­tions of poetry, numer­ous plays (pro­duced off-Broadway and region­ally), and the well-known fam­ily mem­oir, Passion and Prejudice (Knopf, 1989). Sallie has worked as a book edi­tor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville and has been a direc­tor of the National Book Critics Circle. She is 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. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Sallie mar­ried three times: to pub­lisher A. Whitney Ellsworth (1908–1980), attor­ney Michael Iovenko (1930–1971), and con­trac­tor Tim Peters. She has three sons and five grand­chil­dren, and cur­rently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.