Born in London, Wilfrid Sheed is the son of Maisie Ward and Francis Joseph Sheed, both of whom were writers and publishers. Although his father's family were not writers, his mother's side could boast of four generations where "some kind of writing has been going on...." Four years before Sheed was born his parents established the publishing house of Sheed and Ward, which became one of the most respected religious publishers in the world. In 1933 a branch of this firm was opened in New York, and Sheed and Ward became the center of the Catholic intellectual movement in America.

When World War II began, Sheed, then nine, moved with his family from London to Torresdale, Pennsylvania, a place he remembers as almost an abandoned village where there was no one to play with. "I became perhaps the outstanding solitary baseball player of my generation, whaling fungoes down the...