WILFRID SHEED

Wilfrid John Joseph Sheed (27 December 1930 – 19 January 2011) was an English-born American novelist and essayist.

Sheed was born in London to Francis "Frank" Sheed and Mary "Maisie" Ward, prominent Roman Catholic publishers (Sheed & Ward) in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid-20th century. Wilfrid Sheed spent his childhood in both England and the United States before attending Lincoln College, Oxford where he earned BA (1954) and MA (1957) degrees.

Sheed's first novel, A Middle Class Education (1961), was based on his experiences at Oxford. His biography Frank and Maisie was about his parents' literary establishment and intellectual world. He wrote satirical novels about journalism and memoirs in his later years. His book on American popular music, entitled The House that George Built with a little help from Irving, Cole and a Crew of about Fifty was published in 2008.

Garrison Keillor commented in a review of the book:

"Golden Age of American Song has been saluted and high-faluted in books and wept over repeatedly, but “The House That George Built” is a big rich stew of an homage that makes you want to listen to Gershwin and Berlin and Porter and Arlen all over again ... Sheed's jazzy prose is a joy to read. It goes catapulting along, digressing like mad, never pedantic, a little frantic, which is just right: the jazz song, like all true art, is a flight from depression, indifference, the cold blank stare, the earnest clammy touch.

He died on 19 January 2011, aged 80, from urosepsis.

Published works

A Middle Class Education. 1961.
The Hack. 1963.
Square's Progress. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965.
Office Politics. 1966.
The Blacking Factory. 1968.
Max Jamison. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970.
The Morning After: Selected essays and reviews. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971. ISBN 0374213054.
People Will Always Be Kind. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. ISBN 0374230714.
Three Mobs: Labor, church, and Mafia. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1974. ISBN 0836205863.
Muhammad Ali: A Portrait in Words and Photographs. Orion Publishing Group. 1975. ISBN 0297770322
The Good Word & Other Words. New York: Dutton, 1978. ISBN 0525115927.
Transatlantic Blues New York: Dutton, 1978. ISBN 978-0525222262.
Clare Boothe Luce. New York: Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0525030557.
Frank and Maisie: A memoir with parents. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ISBN 0671449907.
The Boys of Winter: A novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. ISBN 039455874X.
Essays in Disguise. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. ISBN 0394558758.
Baseball and Lesser Sports. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. ISBN 0060165316.
My Life as a Fan. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. ISBN 0671767100.
In Love with Daylight: A memoir of recovery. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. ISBN 0671792156.
The House that George Built with a little help from Irving, Cole and a Crew of about Fifty. New York: Random House, 2007 ISBN 9781400061051.
[edit] Awards and honors1987 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes for hisliner notes for The Voice – The Columbia Years 1943-1952, performed by Frank Sinatra.

Rollie McKenna
Wilfrid Sheed
The cause was a bacterial infection, the family said. Mr. Sheed had recently moved from a nursing home in Southampton on Long Island to one in Great Barrington so he could be closer to his wife, Miriam Ungerer Sheed, who had moved there to live near a daughter. The couple had lived for many years on the East End of Long Island.

Born to the founders of the eminent Roman Catholic publishing house Sheed & Ward, Mr. Sheed was from an early age thrown in with writers, intellectuals and serious thinkers about religion, among them the English writer G. K. Chesterton, who was his godfather. He mined his resources industriously, making for himself a much-admired writing career.

“I guess I sort of backed into writing,” Mr. Sheed told Publishers Weekly. “I have taken off from family experiences sometimes as if they were daydreams.”

He wrote, in one form or other, for a half-century, without losing much steam. His last book, published in 2007, was a history of American popular music titled “The House That George Built: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole and a Crew of About Fifty.” It was a critically acclaimed best seller, one that Mr. Sheed had labored over for many years despite debilitating illnesses, dictating parts of it.

As an avid baseball fan whose boyhood fantasies of diamond glory were dashed at 14 by the onset of polio, Mr. Sheed often said that as a writer he could play any position — a utility man of letters. But novelist was clearly a preferred role.

His gently comic fiction focused on self-perceived variations of himself. His early novels concerned American and English schoolboys (“A Middle Class Education” in 1960); a writer of inspirational pieces for minor Catholic publications (“The Hack,” 1963); a bore who learns to live with what he is (“Square’s Progress,” 1965); the beaten-down denizens of a small liberal magazine (“Office Politics,” 1966); and a too-brilliant film and theater critic (“Max Jamison,” 1970).

His later novels were about a politician stricken with polio as a teenager (“People Will Always Be Kind,” 1973); a talk-show host reared by old-line English Catholic parents who couldn’t decide whether they hated England or America more (“Transatlantic Blues,” 1978); and a writer/publisher engaged in cutthroat literary politics on eastern Long Island while planning the next summer’s softball league (“The Boys of Winter,” 1987).

Mr. Sheed’s characters are almost invariably stricken with an agonized sense of self-awareness, exacerbated by their Roman Catholicism. They all but die of hyperconsciousness, laughing as they go to their fates.

When not writing fiction Mr. Sheed turned out nonfiction like “Clare Boothe Luce” (1982), a gentle portrait — part memoir, part biography — of an emotionally brittle figure in publishing and public affairs whom he knew as a youth, spending a summer in her house. “My Life as a Fan” (1993) was a memoir of rooting for big-league baseball that said fresh things about a dozen clichéd subjects. “In Love With Daylight: A Memory of Recovery” (1995) told of his surviving polio, drug and alcohol addiction, and cancer of the tongue. (“Affliction can land where it likes,” he mordantly wrote.)

“ ‘Physically challenged’ indeed!” he blurted out at one point in that book. “We were challenged and we lost, baby, and that’s all she wrote.”

Wilfrid John Joseph Sheed was born in London on Dec. 27, 1930, the younger of two children of Francis Joseph Sheed, who emigrated from Australia with a background in law to become a street-corner evangelist, and Maisie Ward, a fellow Catholic Revivalist and author who was eight years her husband’s senior, a descendant of a proud English Catholic family and, at six feet tall, a striking figure on the streets of London.

Together they founded Sheed & Ward (now an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield), which, besides publishing work by Chesterton, published the Catholic social worker Dorothy Day, the historian Hilaire Belloc and the poet Robert Lowell.

This is Sue Scheible's "A Good Age" column for Aug. 28, 2007.) In his new book, ''The House That George Built,'' writer Wilfred Sheed describes how Howard Dietz, a Hollywood publicist and lyricist, greeted a life crisis with the repeated comment: ''What is life but dancing in the dark?'' Dietz' partner, Howard Schwartz, promptly dashed off a well-preserved tune of the same name.
Press on, improvise, keep the beat. It's one of hundreds of entertaining and thoughtful gems Sheed has mined for this intimate look at the golden age of American popular song - from the 1920s to the 1950s. Writing the book was, he says, ''a labor of love, not a work of scholarship - which means I've been researching it for most of my life, without knowing it.''
Sheed makes it sound (and read) easy. But this detailed and buoyant project is full of carefully interwoven information, insight and wit. The full title is ''The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole and a Crew of About Fifty.'' He begins with the Tin Pan Alley piano era in New York and composers George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. The great jazz song writers are next: Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington. Then it's on to the Broadway stage with Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers. The Hollywood era features Harry Warren, ''the king of the unknowns'' to whom the book is dedicated, Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Mercer, ''the all-American voice.'' The finale returns to Broadway with the great New York musicals, and Frank Loesser, Burton Lane and Cy Coleman. The 309-page hardback is published by Random House for $29.95.