Wilfrid Sheed

During a childhood bout of polio, Sheed learned to his relief that few diseases are as bad as they look from the outside and, to his amazement, that he was actually happier fighting polio than he had ever been before. Later, as a successful, high-living author, he fell prey to what is loosely called depression, an emotional hell ride brought on by booze and sleeping pills, which sent him on a frantic round of psychiatric sessions, AA meetings, and not least a sanitarium, where it was suggested that he'd contracted yet another incurable disease called "addictive personality." And there, while still strung out on chemicals, Sheed the critic began to question the reigning dogmas of therapy and to rediscover his own resources for dealing with sickness.

Wilfred Sheed tells the story of his parents, Maisie Ward and Frank Sheed, who started Sheed and Ward Publishing, whose books change the course of the modern Catholic church.

Anthology contains: Andrea - John O'Hara The Old Maid - Edith Wharton Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck Mario and the Magician - Thomas Mann Pudd'nhead Wilson - Mark Twain Ward No. 6 - Anton Chekhov Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky [The Fall]( - Albert Camus Old Man - William Faulkner Youth - Joseph Conrad The Lesson of the Master - Henry James My Mortal Enemy - Willa Cather The Ghost Writer - Philip Roth The Ebony Tower - John Fowles Catholics - Brian Moore The Blacking Factory - Wilfrid Sheed

Discusses the life of Clare booth Luce, activist in politics and diplomacy.