James Vincent Sheean (December 5, 1899, Pana, Illinois – March 16, 1975,[1] Arolo, Frz. of Leggiuno, Italy) was an American journalist and novelist.

Career

Sheean's most famous work was Personal History (New York: Doubleday, 1935). It won one of the inaugural National Book Awards: the Most Distinguished Biography of 1935.[2][3][lower-alpha 1] Film producer Walter Wanger acquired the political memoir and made it the basis for his 1940 film production Foreign Correspondent, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Sheean served as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune during the Spanish Civil War.[4]

Sheean wrote the narration for the feature-length documentary Crisis (1939) directed by Alexander Hammid and Herbert Kline. He translated Ève Curie's biography of her mother, Madame Curie (1939), into English. Sheean wrote Oscar Hammerstein I: Life and Exploits of an Impresario (1955) as well as a controversial biography of Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy and Red (1963).

He studied at the University of Chicago, becoming part of a literary circle which included Glenway Wescott, Yvor Winters, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Janet Lewis while he was there.[5]

Vincent and Diana Forbes-Robertson Sheean were friends of Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband, Eugen; they spent time together on Ragged Island off the coast of Maine during the summer of 1945.

Books

Partial list, including both fiction and otherwise:

• New Persia (1927) - Iran
• Anatomy of Virtue - (1927) - Psychological romance novel of an American girl who marries an English nobleman.
• American Among the Riffi (1926)
• Gog and Magog
• The Tide (1933) - "If a Messiah Came to Your Town Today, What Would You Think? What Would You Do?".
• Personal History: Youth and Revolution: the Story of One Person's Relationship to Living History (1935)
• Sanfelice (1936) - Historical novel set in Naples
• The Pieces of a Fan (1937)
• A Day of Battle (1938) - Historical novel based on the French victory at Fontenoy in Flanders on May 11, 1745
• Not Peace but a Sword (1939) - Europe. Personal account of events in Prague, Madrid, London, Paris and Berlin during the 12 fateful months between March 1938 and March 1939.[6]
• Lead, Kindly Light: Gandhi & the Way to Peace, Random House (1949). Can Gandhi's non-violent approach lead the world away from violence as the way to settle disputes?
• Between the Thunder and the Sun (1943) Account of being in England during the Battle of Britain.

Notes

References

Further reading

• Cohen, Deborah. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (2022) American coverage of 1930s in Europe by John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson.excerpt

External links

• Biography of Vincent Sheean
• Vincent Sheean at IMDb
• Vincent Sheean at Traces.org
• Sheean's "Holy Land" chapter remains vital to understanding Palestinian conflict
• Vincent Sheean papers at Syracuse University
• Guide to the Vincent Sheean and Ruth Falkenau Correspondence 1919-1986 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center