On a dreary day in October 1922, a young man from Pana, a small town in southern Illinois, walked into the Paris office of the Chicago Tribune. In experience, he scarcely came up to the knee of most journalists. There had been a stint at the Chicago Daily News, from which he was fired; a few months covering scandal for the New York Daily News; and a few months more in Europe, writing the greater part of a novel that was eventually lost. Now Vincent Sheean needed a job and hoped to find one at the Trib, which hired him as a utility man for its Paris newspaper and for the Paris bureau of its foreign service. “In a click of time, I became what was called a ‘foreign correspondent,’ ” he later wrote in Personal History.

The six-foot, two-inch James Vincent Sheean…“Jimmy” to his friends and “Vincent” to the Tribune editors who nixed the idea of a “J. V. Sheean” byline…was never inconspicuous, even at the University of Chicago, from which (in keeping with his early career) he did not graduate. A classmate, John Gunther, described Sheean in awestruck terms: “He hummed Mozart, wore green pants, and spoke better Italian than the Italian professors.” But for all his panache, Sheean was not the only hopeful young journalist walking the streets of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Would-be foreign correspondents “rolled up in waves,” as an editor at the Paris Herald put it, in that city and throughout Europe. Some of the most important names of twentieth-century journalism…Gunther, Eric Sevareid, William Shirer, and Dorothy Thompson, to name just a few…wandered in the way Sheean did, as cubs, and left as lions.

What elevated Sheean even among luminaries in journalism was the literary quality of his reporting, his uncanny ability to...

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