Author: G.K. Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in 1874 in Kensington, West London, into a comfortable middle-class family. He drifted through school as a daydreamer, briefly studied art at the Slade, decided he was not a painter, and fell into journalism in his early twenties. He stayed in journalism for the rest of his life, eventually editing his own magazine, the Catholic-leaning G.K.'s Weekly, while producing an extraordinary volume of books in nearly every genre he tried. Novels, biographies, social criticism, theology, history, poetry, plays, and the detective stories featuring Father Brown that have outlasted most of the rest. He was physically enormous, often around twenty stone, and famously absent-minded in a way that turned into part of his public persona. There is a story, possibly apocryphal but well-attested by his wife Frances, of Chesterton sending her a telegram from a railway station that read: Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be? He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922, partly under the influence of his friend Father John O'Connor, who had been the model for Father Brown a decade earlier. His subsequent religious writing made him one of the most read Catholic apologists of the twentieth century. C.S. Lewis cited his book The Everlasting Man as central to his own conversion to Christianity. Chesterton was a friend and constant sparring partner of George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Hilaire Belloc, debating them in print and in person for decades. His political position, often called distributism, argued for widely distributed small property ownership against both unrestrained capitalism and state socialism. He died in 1936. The Father Brown stories are the most popular things he wrote, but the nonfiction is where his thinking is most fully present.