December 27, 1930

Wilfrid Sheed (December 27,  1930 to January 19, 2011) was an novelist and cultural critic His roots were in an Anglo-Catholic intellectual aristocracy. G. K. Chesterton was his godfather and his parents had a publishing house focusing on Catholic authors. According to his New York Times obituary:

Of his youth Mr. Sheed wrote: “All I knew was that no amount of respectability in other sectors could make up for this one eccentricity... ‘My parents are publishers,’ I would emphasize. But their Catholic publishing seemed almost as bizarre as their Catholic tub-thumping in the starchy secularity of England. So I resigned myself to the delicate pleasures of outsiderness at an early age.”

Such reflective analysis would characterize his essays and fiction. Clever but sincere intellectuals populate his novels. Frank & Maisie: A Memoir With Parents (1985) is an examination of a distinct cultural milieu vanished perhaps today -- wherein the outsiders confidently march on, knowing their audience if small, is discriminating. He was movie and book critic for leading Catholic periodicals like Commonweal, for decades.

For many years he and his second wife, the writer Miriam Ungerer, made their home on Long Island. It was there in 1988 that we find a published reference to a Sheeds' cat. A benefit art show at the Elaine Benson Gallery, benefit for Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons, was reviewed in the Long Island Journal (July 24, 1988) and yielded this apercu. The gallery owner had asked some patrons, who brought their pets, to confine a parrot. Because:

Miriam Ungerer is bird-phobic,'' Ms. Benson told the possessors of the parrot. ''She can't tolerate birds loose like that.'' Across the way, Ms. Ungerer, warily eyeing ...[the parrot], stood with her husband, Wilfrid Sheed. Large birds when not in cages do cause concern, Ms. Ungerer acknowledged. But dogs and cats don't, she said. The writing family Sheeds even own Rufus, ''a red cat,'' who, according to Mr. Sheed, ''eats only store-bought food, nothing natural.'' ''He's very Sag Harbor,'' Mr. Sheed added.