G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton was born and raised in London, where he went to elite private schools and then attended University College London to study art. However, after realizing that he far preferred literature, he dropped out and began working in publishing and journalism. In 1901, he married Francis Blogg, who was a major influence on his religiosity later in life. He began writing a weekly newspaper column the next year—and continued for the rest of his life. But he first rose to literary prominence for his 1904 novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill and his landmark study of Charles Dickens’s work in 1906. Two more of his most significant books, The Man Who Was Thursday and Orthodoxy, followed in 1908 and 1909, and he began writing his famous Father Brown stories in 1910. Over the next three decades, Chesterton was a widely known, well-respected, and famously eccentric mainstay in British literary circles. In addition to his journalism and fiction, he wrote extensively on politics and religion. Politically, he favored a theory called distributism—or broadly redistributing land and resources—which he viewed as a middle ground between socialism and capitalism. Anti-Semitic views also surface in some of his writings. While he grew up with only irregular exposure to religion, he became a devout Anglican during his marriage and then converted to Catholicism in 1922. Many of his late writings focused on explaining and justifying Christian doctrine. Chesterton’s religious and political work deeply influenced thinkers as varied as C.S. Lewis, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mahatma Gandhi. Above all, Chesterton was famous for his chronic absentmindedness, wide circle of friends, frequent involvement in public debates, and enormous stature—he was 6’4” tall and weighed nearly 300 pounds. He died of a heart attack at his Buckinghamshire estate in 1936.