Kirkpatrick Sale (born June 27, 1937) is an American author who has written prolifically about political decentralism, environmentalism, luddism and technology.

"[4] Sale grew up in Ithaca, New York, where he later said 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.

[10] Sale donated 16 boxes of materials—typescripts, galley proofs, correspondence, etc.—for each one of his books to the archives at Cornell University, where they are available for public inspection.

In a New York Times book review, historian and member of the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Committee William Hardy McNeill wrote about Sale: "he has set out to destroy the heroic image that earlier writers have transmitted to us.

Mr. Sale makes Columbus out to be cruel, greedy and incompetent (even as a sailor), and a man who was perversely intent on abusing the natural paradise on which he intruded."

However, McNeill also declared Sale's work to be "unhistorical, in the sense that [it] selects from the often cloudy record of Columbus's actual motives and deeds what suits the researcher's 20th-century purposes."

[2] During promotion of his 1995 book Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution, Sale debated with Newsweek magazine senior editor and technology columnist Steven Levy "about the relative merits of the communications age".

[17] Sale has a comprehensive knowledge of what is called the American Songbook (Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and movie tunes 1910–1960) and was active in the folk revival of the 1960s with Peter Yarrow, Pete Seeger, and the Clancy Brothers, but has said that he does not "care much for" pop music after that era.

[4] In 2004, Sale and members of the Second Vermont Republic formed the Middlebury Institute which is dedicated to the study of separatism, secession, and self-determination.

"[23][24] The Southern Poverty Law Center later criticized The New York Times' October 2007 Peter Applebome interview of Sale for not covering its allegations.

[28] After graduating from Cornell University in 1958, Sale married Faith Apfelbaum, who later worked as an editor with Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and Amy Tan.