Since 1903, members of Arts and Letters have delivered commemorative tributes to fellow members who have passed away. These remarks celebrate and reflect on the lives and work of the members being honored and acknowledge their contribution to the arts. A selection of tributes is now available in the digital archive below. As we prepared this archive, we were reminded that these tributes reflect their times, and, in some instances, include terminology and social and moral judgments we do not endorse.
For results outside of Tributes please use the general search or click here.
Jimmy Sheean was one year older than this century and when he died he had lived enough lives for a dozen men and had become a beau idéal for generations of romantic newspapermen.
James Vincent Sheean, to give him the full name to which he never in his life answered, came out of that fertile journalistic soil, the Chicago of the 1920s—the Chicago of The Tribune, the Hearst papers, and The Daily News, then under the editorship of the brilliant Henry Justin Smith and beginning to make an indelible mark in the field of American foreign correspondence.
Sheean was the star in the Pleiades of the Chicago Daily News, one that contained the famous Mowrer brothers, Hal O'Flaherty, John Gunther, Carroll Binder, William Stoneman, and many, many more.
But actually Sheean was a special one. No young writer who read Sheean's Personal History was ever quite the same again. Personal History was the first and the best of the torrent of correspondents' autobiographies which it touched off. It was the best because it was not merely an adventure story; it was a thoughtful account of a young innocent from Illinois who wandered into one of the crucibles which was to shape the politics of the 20th century—the Chinese Revolution in 1927.
Sheean happened to land in the midst of a chaotic sequence of events from which flowed much which is still valid in world politics—the hostility and tension, for example, between Communist Russia and Communist China. Sheean's best friends were two American Communists, Bill and Rayna Prohme. Sheean fell madly, irrevocably in love with Rayna and his story of those China days, colored by high romance, high adventure, and inevitable tragedy, overnight made Jimmy Sheean a world personality, his book a bestseller, and gave him an aura which he was not to lose during his whole life.
Sheean had written half a dozen books before Personal History in 1935. After Personal History none of them mattered. Nor, alas, did any which he wrote thereafter. He wrote another dozen but none could match the comet of Personal History. Over the years Sheean covered the wars. I can see him still—we all can see him—in that veritable uniform of the foreign correspondent, the belted khaki Burberry with upturned collar—at whatever front existed at a given moment, the Shanghai war, Spain, Hitler's takeover of Vienna and Prague, World War II.
The years after World War II marked Sheean's turn from reportage toward biography and history. He was much attracted to Gandhi. He lectured widely. He lived abroad a good deal of the time. He felt deeply the deaths of his intimate friends, Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis.
With the opening up of China in 1971 his nostalgia to return to the scenes which had been the cradle of his great romance began to stir. He found Chinese officials favorable to his going back and in 1973 he was officially invited to tour China as their guest for a few weeks. However, ill health prevented him from writing of his visit and, to our loss, we do not know what he thought of China in the 1970s.