Children's Literature
Sale's influence on literary criticism is most evident in his work on children's literature. Prior to his work in the 1960s and 1970s, few professional critics chose to take children's literature seriously, but Sale argued that it could and ought to be given the same respect and scrutiny as adult fiction. In 1978, he published a book entitled Fairy Tales and After, which is essentially a collection of essays defending the literary value of children's literature, and then offering his critical perspective on authors from A. A. Milne to Rudyard Kipling to Beatrix Potter.
Sale is also credited with being among the first literary critics to seriously discuss the work of J. R. R. Tolkien (which had been largely dismissed as "juvenile" and unworthy of analysis by most prominent critics, most notably Lionel Trilling). His essay "Tolkien and Frodo Baggins" appeared in Tolkien and the Critics (ed. by Neal Isaacs and Rose Zimbardo) in 1968.
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