Upon graduating in 1958, Sale married Faith Apfelbaum, who later worked as an editor with Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Amy Tan.
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,"[REF] and the New York Times Magazine, before becoming a freelance journalist.