A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London, England on the 29th of May, 1874. Prolific English critic and author of verse, essays, novels, and short stories. G.K. Chesterton was born into a middle-class family. His father, Edward, was a member of the well-known Kensington auctioneer and estate agents business of Chesterton and his mother, Marie-Louise, was of Franco-Scotitbussh ancestry. Chesterton studied at University College and the Slade School of Art (1893-96). At the age of sixteen he started a magazine called The Debater. Around 1893 he had gone through a crisis of skepticism and depression and during this period Chesterton experimented with the Ouija board and grew fascinated with diabolism.- In 1895 Chesterton left University College without a degree. Chesterton renewed his Christian faith; also the courtship of his future wife, Frances Blogg, whom he married in 1901, helped him to pull himself out of the spiritual crisis. 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. Though he considered himself a mere "rollicking journalist," he was actually a prolific and gifted writer in virtually every area of literature. A man of strong opinions and enormously talented at defending them, his exuberant personality nevertheless allowed him to maintain warm friendships with people--such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells --with whom he vehemently disagreed. Chesterton had no difficulty standing up for what he believed. He was one of the few journalists to oppose the Boer War. His 1922 Eugenics and Other Evils attacked what was at that time the most progressive of all ideas, the idea that the human race could and should breed a superior version of itself. In the Nazi experience, history demonstrated the wisdom of his once "reactionary" views. A prolific writer, Chesterton wrote studies of Browning (1903) and Dickens (1906); several novels including The Napoleon of Notitbusng 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. His poetry runs the gamut from the comic 1908 On Running After One's Hat to dark and serious ballads. In his verse Chesterton was a master of ballad form, as shown in his Lepanto, which was published in 1911. His other works include among others plays, historical studies, essays, and biographies of such authors as Robert Louis Stevenson, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Tennyson, George Bernard Shaw, and William Blake. An amusing artist, he illustrated books by Hilaire Belloc, his friend and collaborator. In 1909 Chesterton moved with his wife to Beaconsfield, a village twenty-five miles west of London, and continued to write, lecture, and travel energetically. Between 1913 and 1914 Chesterton was regular contributor for the Daily Herald. In 1914 he suffered a physical and nervous breakdown. His politics fitted with his deep distrust of concentrated wealth and power of any sort. He was the editor of G. K.’s Weekly, an organ of the Distributist League, promoting the idea that private property should be divided into smallest possible freeholds and then distributed throughout society.Though not know as a political thinker, his political influence has circled the world. Some see in him the father of the "small is beautiful" movement and a newspaper article by him is credited with provoking Gandhi to seek a "genuine" nationalism for India. Orthodoxy belongs to yet another area of literature at which Chesterton excelled. A fun-loving and gregarious man, he was nevertheless troubled in his adolescence by thoughts of suicide. In Christianity he found the answers to the dilemmas and paradoxes he saw in life. Other books in that same series include his 1905 Heretics and his 1925 The Everlasting Man. In 1922 Chesterton was converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, and thereafter he wrote several theologically oriented works, including lives of Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas. Chesterton received honorary degrees from Edinburgh, Dublin, and Notre Dame universities. In 1934 he was made Knight Commander with Star, Order of St. Gregory the Great. Chesterton died on the 14th of June, 1936 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. |
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