By JOHN WILLIAMS [The Second Pass] – At 78, with his best work virtually unknown to readers of my generation, Wilfrid Sheed inarguably deserves a renaissance. I luckily discovered him last year when I came across an appreciative blog post by Allen Barra, who wrote, “No other critic approaches [Sheed’s] ability to synthesize the vast literature on a subject or to illuminate a writer’s oeuvre in a short starburst of words.” It’s those starbursts that led fellow critic Jonathan Yardley to call him “irresistibly quotable.” Barra’s tribute was almost entirely a list of “Sheedisms,” and I can’t blame him. It’s almost impossible to write about Sheed without simply offering a buffet of his epigrammatic genius:

[Edward] Albee can no longer wait to tell us what’s on his mind: his plays are coming perilously close to his interviews . . .

It seems [Robert Lowell] was strictly a line poet, string them as you will, so that his poems are like all-star teams that haven’t practiced together.

I have never seen (or joined in) such drinking as the Lit set could contrive in those days. So what would have seemed like a personal drinking problem elsewhere was lost in the crowd, and Berryman drifted into alcoholism without noticing. He and Schwartz had once talked with contempt of writers who drown their talent in booze, but both would now proceed to do so themselves, having badly misjudged the undertow.

. . .

It’s getting ahead of things to say that Sheed has faded away, so I offer my apologies to him. (He published a book just two years ago, in fact: The House That George Built, about the Great American Songbook.) But by my count, he has published 16 books, of which only three remain in print — his most recent as well as two memoirs, one about his life as a baseball fan (a fandom I also count to his credit) and the other about his parents, who were prominent Catholic publishers in the UK, where Sheed was born. Most of his later work is autobiographical, including an account of his struggles with, in order, polio, depression and cancer. His collections of criticism, including Essays in Disguise, are out of print, as are all of his novels.

Sheed is the exceedingly rare critic who doubled as a first-rate writer of fiction. Three of his six novels were nominated for the National Book Award. My favorite of these is Max Jamison, a comic take on marriage, New York and ambition told from the perspective of a cantankerous theater critic in the 1960s.

Continued at The Second Pass | More Chronicle & Notices.