Word: sheed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...like the idea of funny fiction," says Wilfrid Sheed. "When I started writing, my first impulse was toward humor, but I soon learned that I wanted to use it for serious purposes." Sheed's first models were the "flat but musical" styles of such Americans as James Thurber and Sherwood Anderson; later, he added the English writers Cyril Connolly and E. M. Forster. Now he describes his fictional ideal as "Flaubert and James with the language of Wodehouse and Perelman...
...such earlier novels as Square's Progress and Office Politics, Sheed constructs a bright, cutting prose from the dross of everyday slang. He wields that prose with a subtle ear for speech rhythms and a sardonic eye for the telltale gesture. In this new volume, he also musters a quality that had been somewhat lacking in his earlier, coolly satirical work: a sense of urgency. The milieu of childhood that occupies him here seems to have tapped deep, previously unsuspected currents of emotion. Still the accomplished novelist of manners, he is now taking a more searching look...
...mixture in all this of English and American, humorous and serious, is what gives Sheed's writing its characteristic texture. His crisp craftsmanship seems to come from the English satirical tradition, but beneath this veneer the American grain runs deep: he knows his way intimately around the moral and physical landscape of the U.S. middle class. Sheed relishes the ridiculous but champions the sane and normal. His protagonists are ordinary guys desperately trying to fend off the world's idiocies and evils long enough to define themselves and do the decent thing. They rarely succeed completely. Solitary Baseball...
...then, Sheed was enrolled in Downside, a Benedictine prep school in England somewhat resembling Sopworth in The Blacking Factory. Eventually, he took a degree in history at Oxford, spent a year with his father's relatives in Sydney, Australia ("more eccentricity per square foot than anywhere"), and settled in Greenwich Village as a writer. His first novel, A Middle Class Education (1961), earned him a small reputation that has grown slowly but steadily. Last year his fourth novel, Office Politics, was nominated for a National Book Award. Now, at 37, he is justly rated as one of the nation...
Critical Cascade. Sheed, who is married and has three children, does his writing in a studio on Manhattan's West Side. With one of his cherished Hoyo de Monterey cigars always within reach, he scribbles in longhand with a No. 2 pencil. He half-consciously removes his clothes as he works. Precisely why he does that is a mystery but, whatever the reason, it enables him to produce a cascade of critical pieces in addition to his fiction. He is book editor of Commonweal, film critic for Esquire, and a freelance reviewer for at least half a dozen other...