The pitter-patter clinking of keys was seemingly always audible throughout the house, either from James Webster Sherwood’s typewriter or computer, no matter if he wrote from his former home in the Village of Plandome or his family’s cabin in Montana or at his stepdaughter’s residence in Arizona, where he died suddenly last Christmas night at age 78.
Sherwood was a writer through and through, planning and publishing novels and sonnets and even works of non-fiction across the decades, cultivating a fan base in Montana for his 2010 book, “Going to the Sun,” that has grown so much that his wife Karyn said she is still scheduling book signings and discussions on his behalf with the help of a stamp she is having made of his signature.
“Writing was his passion. He was writing a book [when he died] which, one of his dear friends, the editor of ‘Going to the Sun,’ they had been sending copies back and forth,” Karyn Sherwood said from her home in Scottsdale, Ariz. on Thursday.
“It was a California version of the Montana book,” she continued. “There was a lot of dissension in his family between his mother and father, and this is a book about that. It’s called ‘Dining on Thorns.’ We’re working on getting it published.”
Born in Hollywood, Calif. on May 18, 1936, Sherwood made Montana his home, in the middle of Glacier Park, where he and Karyn spent their summers traveling the American west.
When they sold their Plandome house last summer, that was the plan, she said, to continue their own personal westward expansion and live equidistant from nature and family in Arizona and Colorado.
Sherwood died weeks before he and his wife were set to move to their newly acquired house in Scottsdale, where Karyn said they had fallen in love with the cacti and dirt surrounding them.
“My husband never got to live in the house we chose,” she said. “I can feel his presence all over the place. It’s hard.”
He is survived by three daughters from a previous marriage, Veronica, Alexandra and Roxanna, as well as son Jimmy and stepsons Christopher and George and seven grandchildren.
Having grown up in a family ripe with the name “James,” Sherwood sought a nickname in the phone book as a boy and discovered “Jas,” then a common shortening of his birth name.
He changed the “s” to a “z” and became “Jaz,” which he answered to all his life.
“There were about 10 Jims in his family,” Karyn said. “He never really cared for ‘Jim.’”
The Sherwoods met at James’ 35th anniversary reunion in 1989 at the Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school in Wallingford, Conn. – whose famous alumni include John F. Kennedy. Karyn attended with her brother, a classmate of James.
“He had a daughter, Roxanna, she was a sophomore, and my son Christopher was a freshman. We met immediately,” Karyn said. “We were the only people that still had children in the school. We struck up a conversation and knew immediately.”
They were married March 18, 1990 and moved into the Village of Plandome residence Karyn had purchased a few years prior to live with her mother.
Professionally, Sherwood co-founded and operated the Sherwood, Justice & Barton Limousine Corp., which he sold just three days before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
But throughout that time, he continued to write, having had his 1962 erotic novel “Stradella” become a bestseller decades earlier.
In 1997, Sherwood published “Some Sonnets of Flame & Flower,” written in the literary tradition of William Shakespeare. Three years later, he released the novel “Shakespeare’s Ghost,” which brought to life the belief that the 16th century playwright was really Edward deVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.
“He loved watching the news and looking to politics to determine what to write. That was his passion, too,” Karyn said. “When he was thinking about what he was going to write, he was watching Fox News.”
