Sallie Bingham

 

Taken by the Shawnee

“This is an amazing book, and I couldn’t stop reading it.”
— Joan Silber, PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement

 

“Sallie Bingham has imagined her ancestor’s history so graphically, so passionately, that every page of this astounding story electrifies.”
— Joan Frank, author of Juniper Street: a Novel and Late Work

 
Taken by the Shawnee cover

Now Available from Turtle Point Press

In a most unusual portrait of early America, a young mother’s years in captivity with the Shawnee prove to be the best years of her life.

It’s 1779 and a young white woman named Margaret Erskine is venturing west from Virginia, on horseback, with her baby daughter and the rest of her family. She has no experience of Indians, and has absorbed most of the prejudices of her time, but she is open-minded, hardy, and mentally strong, a trait common to most of her female descendants–Sallie Bingham’s ancestors...

This is the seldom told story of the making of this country in the years of the Revolution, what it cost in lives and suffering, and how one woman among many not only survived extreme hardship, but flourished.

“Bingham recounts this fascinating story of capture, survival, progress, healing, and return with lush descriptions and respect for all involved with Margaret’s complicated story. She is a smart and empathetic writer, and has created an awesome account of female survival at a horrific time.”— Booklist

 

“The novel paints a compelling portrait of womanhood in this era. Crucially, the author depicts the violence of the period as integral to the colonial project, dismissing any propagandistic delusions of one-sided "savagery" and instead depicting each culture without romance or bias.”— Kirkus Reviews

 
 

Recent Short Story Awards


“What I Learned from Fat Annie”
Recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize for 2023.
Forthcoming in How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (Fall 2025).


“How Daddy Lost His Ear”
Second prize in the 2023 Sean O'Faolain Short Story Competition.
Forthcoming in How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (Fall 2025).


“July Fourth”
Honorable Mention in the 2024 Stories That Need to Be Told Contest.
Forthcoming in How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (Fall 2025).

 
 

The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke

“Men who inherit great wealth are respected, but women who do the same are ridiculed. In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham rescues Doris Duke from this gendered prison and shows us just how brave, rebellious, and creative this unique woman really was, and how her generosity benefits us to this day.”— Gloria Steinem

 

“In her fascinating book about tobacco heiress Doris Duke, whose net worth had ballooned to $1.2 billion by her death in 1993, Bingham gets at how inherited wealth liberates women but also burdens them.”— The National Book Review, "5 HOT BOOKS"

 

“In this illuminating biography, Bingham (The Blue Box) chronicles the life of philanthropist and tobacco heiress Doris Duke (1912–1993)... Bingham is a generous biographer in this exacting, measured work.”— Publishers Weekly

 

“Bingham adds a trove of new material to the Duke oeuvre, including revealing quotations from letters and details of daily life on Duke’s many estates. ”— The New York Times

 

Prefer text? Read the transcript.

Sallie Bingham is a writer, teacher, feminist activist, and philanthropist.

Sallie’s first novel was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1961; she has since published six additional novels and the well-known family memoir, Passion and Prejudice (Knopf, 1989). Her latest book, The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke, is now available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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.

 

Sallie's Latest

Taken by the Shawnee
(Turtle Point Press, 2024)

Doris Duke
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)

Little Brother
(Sarabande Books, 2022)

 
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