Background
Reid was born at Whithorn in Galloway, Scotland, the son of a clergyman.
Reid was born at Whithorn in Galloway, Scotland, the son of a clergyman.
After the war he studied Classics at the University of Street Andrews and briefly taught Classics at Sarah Lawrence College, New New York
He was known for his lighthearted style of poems and for his translations of South American poets Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. Although he was known for translations, his own poems had gained notice during his lifetime. He had lived in Spain, Switzerland, Greece, Morocco, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and in the United States.
During the editorship of William Shawn he wrote for The New Yorker magazine, but his main income was from teaching.
During the Second World War he served in the Royal Navy decoding ciphers. In the mid-1950s he travelled to Mallorca, spending some time working as the secretary of Robert Graves.
In 1984, in an interview for the Wall Street Journal, Reid admitted fabricating many details of his reporting from Spain for the New Yorker, including inventing places and ascribing statements to composite characters. He said these inventions were an attempt to present "a larger truth, of which facts form a part." In his book, Whereabouts, Reid counters this article with the following:
These pieces were at the center of a curious storm that blew up in the American press during June of 1984.
A year or so before, I had addressed a seminar at Yale University on the wavering line between fact and fiction, using examples from various writers, Borges among them, and from my own work.
A student from the seminar went on to become a reporter and published a piece in the Wall Street Journal that charged me with having made a practice of distorting facts, quoting the cases I had cited in the seminar. Many newspaper editorials took up the story as though it were fact, and used it to wag pious fingers at the New Yorker. A number of columnists reproved me for writing about an "imaginary" Spanish village, a charge that would have delighted the flesh-and-blood inhabitants.
Not a single one of my critics, as far as I could judge, had gone back to read the pieces in question.
During the 1980s and 1990s he spent much of his time on a ginger plantation in Samaná, Dominican Republic, until 2003 when tourism boomed in the area. Reid died on 21 September 2014, aged 88, due to a gastric bleed during treatment for pneumonia.