Sheed — who described himself as a “chronic foreigner” — took an outsider’s view of the world, drawing on his experiences of life on both sides of the Atlantic. His darkly comic novels won comparisons with the works of Evelyn Waugh and, as in Waugh’s novels, there is an underlying seriousness behind Sheed’s urbane, witty prose. This fascination with human motivation and the moral complexities of existence was rooted in his Roman Catholic upbringing.
Wilfrid Sheed in his New York apartment
The younger of two children, Wilfrid John Joseph Sheed was born in London on December 27 1930 to prominent Catholic parents. His father, Frank Sheed, the son of a working-class Australian family, was a convert from Methodism. His mother, Maisie Ward, was the daughter of English gentry who had been Catholic ever since her grandfather, a friend of John Henry Newman, had converted from High Anglicanism.
Caught up in the Catholicism of GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc (Chesterton was Sheed’s godfather), Frank and Maisie joined the Catholic Evidence Guild and spread the good word on street corners. They went on to found a publishing house, Sheed & Ward which, from the 1930s to the 1960s, reflected Catholic thought during the mid-century “Catholic Revival”, helping to foment the debate within the Church that led to Vatican II.
As Wilfrid Sheed put it in his portrait of his parents, Frank and Maisie (1985), Sheed & Ward “gave Catholics permission to think without benefit of clergy”. They also wrote books: he, works of theology and philosophy for the lay reader; she, biographies of Chesterton and Robert Browning.
Sheed described his parents’ professional style as “movement, improvisation”, and this carried over into their domestic life. They were constantly on the move. Wilfrid spent his early childhood in England and his later childhood and early adolescence near Philadelphia (where he developed a lifelong obsession with baseball – which in 1993 became the subject of his book My Life as a Fan).
He then went back and forth to schools (including Downside) in both countries before taking a degree in History at Lincoln College, Oxford.
At the age of 14 he suffered a devastating attack of polio, the first of a series of afflictions that included clinical depression and addiction to sleeping pills and alcohol; he endured tongue cancer requiring replacement of his jawbone, then a return of polio, which he chronicled in In Love With Daylight: A Memory of Recovery (1995).
After leaving university and a short spell working in Australia, Sheed decided to settle permanently in the United States. Moving to New York, he worked for Jubilee, a magazine he described as “the Catholic answer to the Beatniks”. His long career as a journalist, first in New York and then in the Hamptons, included periods at The New York Review of Books, Esquire, GQ, Sports Illustrated and the New York Times Book Review.
Sheed’s first novel, A Middle Class Education (1960), about a Rhodes scholar at Oxford who plays the wastrel while privately making sure that he is not burning any bridges, won praise for its lively style. The Hack (1963), about a Catholic writer who undergoes a crisis of faith, was less well received. It was Office Politics (1966), about the jockeying for power among the staff of a magazine, that made his name as a novelist. The book was nominated for a National Book Award and praised for its psychological depth. Altogether he wrote nine novels, of which Max Jamison (1970) won him a second National Book Award nomination.
His last book, The House that George Built: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole and a Crew of About Fifty (2007), won a glowing review from Garrison Keillor, who described it as “a big rich stew of a homage that makes you want to listen to Gershwin and Berlin and Porter and Arlen all over again”.
Wilfrid Sheed’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Miriam, and by three children of his first marriage.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8314403/Wilfrid-Sheed.html
At the age of 14 he suffered a devastating attack of polio, the first of a series of afflictions that included clinical depression and addiction to sleeping pills and alcohol; he endured tongue cancer requiring replacement of his jawbone, then a return of polio, which he chronicled in In Love With Daylight: A Memory of Recovery (1995).
After leaving university and a short spell working in Australia, Sheed decided to settle permanently in the United States. Moving to New York, he worked for Jubilee, a magazine he described as “the Catholic answer to the Beatniks”. His long career as a journalist, first in New York and then in the Hamptons, included periods at The New York Review of Books, Esquire, GQ, Sports Illustrated and the New York Times Book Review.
Sheed’s first novel, A Middle Class Education (1960), about a Rhodes scholar at Oxford who plays the wastrel while privately making sure that he is not burning any bridges, won praise for its lively style. The Hack (1963), about a Catholic writer who undergoes a crisis of faith, was less well received. It was Office Politics (1966), about the jockeying for power among the staff of a magazine, that made his name as a novelist. The book was nominated for a National Book Award and praised for its psychological depth. Altogether he wrote nine novels, of which Max Jamison (1970) won him a second National Book Award nomination.
His last book, The House that George Built: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole and a Crew of About Fifty (2007), won a glowing review from Garrison Keillor, who described it as “a big rich stew of a homage that makes you want to listen to Gershwin and Berlin and Porter and Arlen all over again”.
Wilfrid Sheed’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Miriam, and by three children of his first marriage.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8314403/Wilfrid-Sheed.html
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