Wilfrid Sheed

(1930 - 2011)

Born in England in 1930, Wilfrid Sheed was brought to America as a boy and developed a local’s love for baseball; he said he could play any position when it came to the world of writing. His parents founded a Catholic publishing house, Sheed & Ward, and his godfather was G.K. Chesterton, giving him early access to the world of literature. Sheed’s New York Times obituary notes that his “characters are almost invariably stricken with an agonized sense of self-awareness, exacerbated by their Roman Catholicism. They all but die of hyper-consciousness, laughing as they go to their fates.”