G K Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton (Gilbert Keith Chesterton), 1874-1936, English author. Conservative, even reactionary, in his thinking, Chesterton was a convert (1922) to Roman Catholicism and its champion. He has been called the "prince of paradox" because his dogma is often hidden beneath a light, energetic, and whimsical style. A prolific writer, Chesterton wrote studies of Browning (1903) and Dickens (1906); several novels including The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man Who Was Thursday (1908); a noted series of crime stories featuring Father Brown as detective; many poems, collected in 1927; and his famous essays, collected in Tremendous Trifles (1909), Come to Think of It (1930), and other volumes. He was the editor of G. K.'s Weekly, an organ of the Distributist League, which advocated the small-holding system. An amusing artist, he illustrated books by Hilaire Belloc , his friend and collaborator.

Bibliography: See his autobiography (1936); the Ignatius Press edition of his complete works (1990-); biographies by D. Barker (1973) and M. Ffinch (1986); studies by C. Hollis (1970), J. West (1915, repr. 1973), A. S. Dale (1985), and Q. Lauer (1988).

Chesterton, G.K. ( Gilbert Keith) (1874–1936) English essayist, novelist, biographer, and poet. Best known for his Father Brown stories, which began in 1911, he also wrote literary criticism and essays on social and political themes. His novels include The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man who was Thursday (1908). He became a Catholic (1922) and wrote St Francis of Assisi (1923) and St Thomas Aquinas (1933). His Collected Poems was published in 1933.

Chesterton, G. K. ( Gilbert Keith Chesterton) (1874–1936), made his name in journalism writing (with Belloc) for the Speaker, in which both took a controversial, anti-Imperial, pro-Boer line on the Boer war; his friendship with Belloc earned them from G. B. Shaw, the twin nickname of ‘Chesterbelloc’. His first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), a fantasy set in a future in which London is plunged into a strange mixture of medieval nostalgia and street warfare, develops his political attitudes, glorifying the little man, the colour and romance of ‘Merry England’, and attacking big business, technology, and the monolithic state. These themes echo through his fiction, which includes The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908), and his many volumes of short stories, of which the best known are those which feature Father Brown, an unassuming East Anglian Roman Catholic priest, highly successful in the detection of crime by intuitive methods, who first appears in The Innocence of Father Brown (1911); Chesterton himself became a Roman Catholic in 1922. He published several volumes of verse; his most characteristic poems (with some exceptions, such as ‘The Donkey’ from The Wild Knight, 1900, and ‘Lepanto’, from Poems, 1915) celebrate the Englishness of England, the nation of Beef and Beer, e.g. ‘The Secret People’ (1915) and ‘The Rolling English Road’ (1914).

Chesterton also wrote literary criticism, including works on R. Browning (1903), Dickens (1906), and Shaw (1910), and many volumes of political, social, and religious essays. Much of his vast output has proved ephemeral, but Chesterton's vigour, idiosyncrasies, optimism, puns, and paradoxes celebrate the oddity of life and the diversity of people and places with a peculiar and at times exhilarating violence.