Edward R.F. Sheehan, 78, foreign correspondent, novelist

In addition to his reporting overseas, Edward Sheehan wrote several novels, including ''Kingdom of Illusion.'' (file/1964)

In Edward R.F. Sheehan's last opinion piece for the Globe, he wrote of returning to the Middle East, which he visited often during the past half century.

He called President Bush's peace plan "moribund" and reported that among Palestinians, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had "become a forlorn figure." But along with casting a seasoned eye on the powerful, Mr. Sheehan stepped into the lives of those on the Gaza Strip who cope each day with the violence and poverty of a battle-torn land.

"At Khan Younis near the sea, buildings chopped in half by Israeli bombs are still inhabited, and laundry hangs from the ruins," Mr. Sheehan wrote on Aug. 6. "A man named Ahmed, who has lost a leg, invites me upstairs into his flat to meet his wife and 10 children. The ceiling sags. 'Aren't you afraid it will collapse?' I ask. 'We have nowhere else to go,' he answers."

Journalist and playwright, novelist and scholar, Mr. Sheehan traveled the world and used his writing to shine a light on the mighty and the powerless. He died Nov. 3 in Massachusetts General Hospital of an allergic reaction to medication, according to his sister, Clotilde Farrell of Cape Cod.

Mr. Sheehan was 78 and lived in Newton.

Grounded in years spent in Catholic schools, he brought a moral vision to dispatches from lands as far away as Ethiopia, where he noted that beggars "beat on the windows" of passing cars, and Nicaragua, where he interviewed the homeless and displaced.

"In Newton Centre, where I grew up, I had been educated in grammar school by the Sisters of St. Joseph at Sacred Heart Parish, whose pastor was Bishop [later Cardinal] Richard Cushing, whom I saw nearly every day for five years because I was his altar boy," he wrote for the Globe in 1998. "That was a time during World War II when a moral consensus reigned between the major religions, right and wrong were clearly defined, and the authority of the Roman Church was virtually unchallenged in Massachusetts."

He added that his Jesuit education taught him that "actions have consequences."

His writing career began while he was a student at Boston College, filing stories for the Globe from the Chestnut Hill campus. Graduating in 1952, Mr. Sheehan spent two years in the Navy, then was a Globe correspondent in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, collecting more distant datelines in a couple of years than most reporters do in a lifetime.

He wrote in Egypt from Cairo, Port Said, and Sohag, and in Italy from Rome, Cosenza, and Foggia. He traveled to Barcelona, Berlin, Bonn, and Brussels, and filed from Edinburgh, Madrid, Munich, and Paris. Mr. Sheehan reported from the countryside of Ireland and in Morocco's Casablanca.

Then, he joined the US Foreign Service and spent four years as a press attaché and cultural officer at the US embassies in Cairo and Beirut. In 1961, at 31, he turned to freelance writing, and during the next 47 years, along with occasionally appearing in the Globe, his byline ran in The Saturday Evening Post, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books.

The Middle East was the setting for Mr. Sheehan's first novel, "Kingdom of Illusion," published in 1964. The following year, he moved to Paris, where he lived for about a decade. Other novels and nonfiction books followed. While in Paris, he wrote "The Governor," about Massachusetts politics. In 1993, he examined the flow of immigrants across Mexico's border with Texas for his novel "Innocent Darkness," and in 1997, he wrote "Cardinal Galsworthy," about a British cardinal who is seen as a potential papal successor.

But his reporting and nonfiction books drew more attention, particularly a piece for the quarterly journal Foreign Policy on Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, which Mr. Sheehan expanded into the 1976 book "The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger." His reporting provided a fly-on-the-wall account of Kissinger's confidential meetings with leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.

At the time, Mr. Sheehan was a scholar at what is now Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. After spending four years in the mid-1970s as a fellow, then a research fellow, Mr. Sheehan spent a few years focusing on the production of his play, "Kingdoms," about what he called the "ferocious combat" between Emperor Napoleon I and Pope Pius VII. The play ran at Kennedy Center in Washington and on Broadway.

Stages in Washington and New York City were gentler places than Mr. Sheehan's preferred locales for reporting.

"He almost got killed a number of times," his sister said. "Somalia was one. There was shooting, and he rolled into a ditch, and I think there were 20 people killed all around him, and that wasn't the only place there was gunfire. He was an adventurer."

Wherever he went, Mr. Sheehan tried to help those in need and reported just as frankly about his frustrations and sadness.

"Like the Brahmins of Calcutta who do not see the squalor of the casteless, the more well-to-do Hondurans seem collectively blind to what happens in the streets of their capital," he wrote for The New York Review of Books in 1986. "The streets of Tegucigalpa swarm with abandoned children, some of them only two or three years old."

Mr. Sheehan told of how he bought a series of meals for "a horde of children, barefoot and in rags," including some who were addicted to sniffing Resistol, a glue. He offered to help place them in orphanages, but the children turned him down, preferring to live in the streets.

"I took them to a cheap restaurant, fed them for the last time," he wrote, "and left them to their lives of begging coins and sniffing Resistol."

In addition to his sister, Mr. Sheehan leaves three brothers, William, David, and Peter.

A funeral Mass will be said at 11 a.m. today in Sacred Heart Church in Newton Centre. Burial will be in St. Joseph's Cemetery in West Roxbury.