Barry Bingham Jr., former editor and publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and one-third of the “corrosive feud” (NYT) that led to the dissolution of the Bingham media empire, died April 3rd from respiratory failure. He was 72.

In a sweep of high drama, the New York Times’ Robert McFadden describes the 1986 sale of the broadcast and publishing conglomerate as a “tragedy mirroring the tortured Mississippi Delta families of William Faulkner's novels.” A conflict between Bingham and his two sisters, Sallie and Eleanor, over control of the family’s two newspapers, television station, radio stations, and printing company resulted in the closeout of all businesses by their father, Barry Bingham Sr. The same year, Bingham Jr. responded by issuing a statement in the New York Times calling the sale “a betrayal of the traditions and principles which I have sought to perpetuate.” He had garnered three Pulitzer Prizes for the Courier-Journal during his tenure.

Working in the tradition of writer Alex S. Jones, who co-wrote The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty and called the family strife “as ancient as the struggle between Cain and Abel” in a 1987 NYT article, McFadden details the tragic family history, beginning from Bingham’s struggle as child with a reading disability to the death of his two brothers in freak accidents – one during a driving mishap with an ill-positioned surfboard, and the other electrocuted by a string of party lights. Not groomed as heir apparent, Bingham graduated from Harvard in 1956 with a degree in history; nevertheless, he went on to work for CBS and NBC in New York, and took over as editor and publisher in 1971 after his father’s retirement.

Apparently, business was not the only source of family intrigue. McFadden paraphrases Sallie Bingham’s 2000 memoir, Passion and Prejudice: “the family reputation for public service and liberality was a myth, and [that] its history was actually a lurid tale of incest, suicide, fortune-hunting men, cheated women, even a murder.”

Faulkner would have been proud.