Kirkpatrick Sale - Life and Work

Life and Work

Sale grew up in Cayuga Heights, Ithaca, New York, and would later say of the village that he "spent most of my first twenty years there, and that has made an imprint on me–on my philosophy, social attitudes, certainly on my politics–that has lasted powerfully for the rest of my life." He graduated from Cornell University, majoring in history, in 1958. He served as editor of the student-owned and managed newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Sale was one of the leaders of the May 23, 1958 protest against university policies forbidding male and female students fraternizing and its "in loco parentis" policy. Sale and his friend and roommate Richard Farina, and three others, were charged by Cornell. The protest was described in Farina's 1966 novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. In 1958 he collaborated with Thomas Pynchon on an unproduced futuristic musical called "Minstrel Island."

Upon graduating in 1958, Sale married Faith Apfelbaum, who later worked as an editor with Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Amy Tan. Faith died in 1999.

Sale worked initially in journalism for the leftist journal New Leader, "a magazine founded in 1924 in part by socialists Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs," and the New York Times Magazine, before becoming a freelance journalist. He spent time in Ghana and wrote his first book about it. His second book, SDS, was about the radical 1960s group Students for a Democratic Society, of which he was a founder. The book "is still considered one of the best sources on the youth activist organization that helped define 1960s radicalism." In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Subsequent books explored radical decentralism, bioregionalism, environmentalism, the Luddites and similar themes. He "has been a regular contributor to progressive magazines like Mother Jones and The Nation for the better part of his writing career," and has continued to write for those publications, as well as for The American Conservative, CounterPunch, The New York Review of Books, and the Utne Reader. Sale presented public affairs programming for WBAI in the early 1980s and has made appearances on alternative radio over the years. Sale has donated 16 boxes of materials—typescripts, galley proofs, correspondence, etc.—for each one of his books to the archives at Cornell University (2BKroch Library, Cornell, Ithaca, 14853), where they are available for public inspection.