Happy Birthday G K Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874. A prolific writer, he also gave talks on the radio in the 1930s that were quite popular. The article about him on Wikipedia says, “Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4,000 essays (mostly newspaper columns), and several plays. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, The Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G.K.’s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica, including the entry on Charles Dickens and part of the entry on Humour.”

Whew! I’m exhausted just reading about everything he did. And all these things were not short knock-off pieces with little thought. He was a deep thinker blessed with wit and humor, and the ability to explain complex concepts in terms easy to follow. His most popular character was Father Brown who solved mysteries and was able to impart moral teaching without being preachy. Other famous books were the novel The Man Who Was Thursday and his non-fiction Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. He wrote poetry and biographies of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas. I can recommend any and all of these, having read them myself.

Although he is best known as a writer, he attended the Slade School of Art to become an illustrator. Many of his sketches show the same humor as his writing. Journalism became his profession and by 1902 he had a weekly column in the Daily News. Chesterton was raised as a Unitarian and became an Anglican in 1901. However, he began writing about and defending the Catholic faith and was received into the Church in 1922. He died in 1936.

Chesterton influenced writers and thinkers from Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen to C. S. Lewis, Jorge Luis Borges, Marshall McLuhan, and Mahatma Gandhi. He inspired Father Ian Boyd to begin the journal The Chesterton Review and Dale Ahlquist to found the American Chesterton Society and help begin the Chesterton Academy in Minneapolis. His legacy lives on as more schools are named for him and contemporary artists – literary and musical – are inspired by him. For more information, check out the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton in the list of Helpful Links at the right. I can only scratch the surface here but it’s worth the time to read more about him and by him.