Robert Worth Bingham IV[1][2] (March 14, 1966[3] – November 28, 1999) was an American writer and a founding editor of the Open City Magazine.
[4] A member of a wealthy family from Louisville, Kentucky, his great-grandfather was the politician and newspaper publisher Robert Worth Bingham,[3] and his grandfather, Barry Bingham, Sr., went into the family newspaper businesses as an editor and publisher.
[7] After graduating from Columbia, his fiction and non-fiction appeared in The New Yorker, and he worked for two years as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily.
[8] Bingham died of a heroin overdose at age 33 on November 28, 1999, six months after marrying Harvard graduate art historian Vanessa Scharven Chase, daughter of Theodore Chase Jr., professor of biochemistry at Cook College, Rutgers University[9][3] and five months before the publication of his novel.
[11][12] Bingham was also a friend of the late poet/musician David Berman (leader of the band Silver Jews); the song "Death Of An Heir of Sorrows", from Silver Jews' 2001 album Bright Flight, is an elegy for Bingham.