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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," and the New York Times Magazine, before becoming a freelance journalist. He spent time in Ghana and wrote his first book about it. His second book, SDS, was about the radical 1960s group Students for a Democratic Society, of which he was a founder. The book "is still considered one of the best sources on the youth activist organization that helped define 1960s radicalism." In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Subsequent books explored radical decentralism, bioregionalism, environmentalism, the Luddites and similar themes. He "has been a regular contributor to progressive magazines like Mother Jones and The Nation for the better part of his writing career," and has continued to write for those publications, as well as for The American Conservative,CounterPunch, The New York Review of Books, and the Utne Reader. Sale presented public affairs programming for WBAI in the early 1980s and has made appearances on alternative radio over the years. Sale has donated 16 boxes of materials— typescripts, galley proofs, correspondence, etc.—for each one of his books to the archives at Cornell University (2BKroch Library, Cornell, Ithaca, 14853), where they are available for public inspection.
