FAITH SALE is Vice President and Senior Executive Editor at G.P. Putnam’s Sons, where she has worked since December 1979. She began her publishing career after she graduated from Cornell University in 1958, when she joined Alfred A. Knopf as editorial department secretary.

In 1959, she became an editorial assistant and then assistant editor at J.B. Lippincott. She went to Macmillan as an associate editor in 1963 but resigned later that year to live out of the country. Upon her return to the U.S. she did freelance editorial work for publishing companies, literary agents, and authors, read for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and was a founding editor of Fiction magazine.

In 1977, Sale was named Senior Editor at E.P. Dutton, a position she held until joining Putnam’s. While at Dutton, she edited fiction by Alice Hoffman (whom she brought to Putnam’s), Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, James McConkey, Dennis Smith, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

At Putnam’s, Sale has published first novels by Amy Tan, Perri Klass, Connie May Fowler, Nanci Kincaid, Rachel Kadish, Susan Power, Josh Henkin, Kelly Dwyer, Tama Janowitz, Patricia Browning Griffith, and Mitch Berman--and she was the first in the U.S. to publish Pat Barker and Kazuo Ishiguro. She has also edited fiction by Kurt Vonnegut, Kaye Gibbons, Lee Smith, Bebe Moore Campbell, Delia Ephron, Tim McLaurin, Doris Grumbach, Joseph Heller, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Paule Marshall, Delia Ephron, among others.

Soon to be published are new works by Amy Tan, Kurt Vonnegut, Delia Ephron, Kelly Dwyer, Marina Budhos, Lee Smith, and a first novel by Heidi Julavits.

Faith Sale lives in New York City and Cold Spring, New York, with her husband, the writer Kirkpatrick Sale. She has been active in PEN American Center for the past twenty years.

“My devotion to fiction is born more out of instinct than intellect, based more on emotional response than calculated judgment. The moment of connection is the moment I become a book’s (or an author’s ) advocate--its nurturer, defender, supporter, mouthpiece, bodyguard.”

---from “Editing Fiction as an Act of Love” Editors on Editing, 3rd edition, 1993