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.
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Early life
She was born Sarah Montague Bingham in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 22, 1937. After growing up in Louisville, she received a BA in English from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts. Having met A. Whitney Ellsworth in college, she married him and they lived together in Boston, having one child, now-film producer Barry Ellsworth. She then moved to New York after finishing her first novel and she and Ellsworth divorced.
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, seven additional novels, three collections of poetry, and eight plays (produced off-Broadway and regionally). She also wrote three family memoirs: Passion and Prejudice (Knopf, 1989), The Blue Box (Sarabande Books, 2014), and Little Brother (Sarabande Books, 2022).
Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Greensboro Review, 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. In 1988, she endowed a women's studies archivist position at the Duke University Special Collections Library. This position eventually became the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture in 1999.
In the 1980s, Bingham sat on the board of the 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 political activity brought her into direct conflict with her brother, Barry Bingham Jr., who by then led the board. Barry Bingham Jr. eventually expelled all his family members from the board and 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.
Later life and death
Bingham was married three times: to publisher A. Whitney Ellsworth, attorney Michael Iovenko, and contractor Tim Peters. She had three sons—Barry Ellsworth, William Iovenko, and 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. Her last book, the story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear, was published posthumously by Turtle Point Press in September 2025.