The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

BIOGRAPHY
G.K. Chesterton, in full Gilbert Keith Chesterton (born May 29, 1874, London, England—died June 14, 1936, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire), English critic and author of verse, essays, novels, and short stories, known also for his exuberant personality and rotund figure.

Chesterton was educated at St. Paul’s School and later studied art at the Slade School and literature at University College, London. His writings to 1910 were of three kinds. First, his social criticism, largely in his voluminous journalism, was gathered in The Defendant (1901), Twelve Types: A Collection of Mini-Biographies (1902), and Heretics (1905). In it he expressed strongly pro-Boer views in the South African War. Politically, he began as a Liberal but after a brief radical period became, with his Christian and medievalist friend Hilaire Belloc, a Distributist, favouring the distribution of land. This phase of his thinking is exemplified by What's Wrong with the World (1910).

His second preoccupation was literary criticism. Robert Browning (1903) was followed by Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906) and Criticisms and Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911), prefaces to the individual novels, which are among his finest contributions to criticism. His George Bernard Shaw (1909) and The Victorian Age in Literature (1913) together with William Blake (1910) and the later monographs William Cobbett (1925) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1927) have a spontaneity that places them above the works of many academic critics.

Chesterton’s third major concern was theology and religious argument. He was converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1922. Although he had written on Christianity earlier, as in his book Orthodoxy (1909), his conversion added edge to his controversial writing, notably The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926), his writings in G.K.’s Weekly, and Avowals and Denials - A Book of Essays (1934). Other works arising from his conversion were St. Francis of Assisi (1923), the essay in historical theology The Everlasting Man (1925), The Thing (1929; also published as The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic), and Saint Thomas Aquinas (1933).

In his verse Chesterton was a master of ballad forms, as shown in the stirring “Lepanto: With Explanatory Notes and Commentary” (1911). When it was not uproariously comic, his verse was frankly partisan and didactic. His essays developed his shrewd, paradoxical irreverence to its ultimate point of real seriousness. He is seen at his happiest in such essays as “On Running After One's Hat and Other Whimsies” (1908) and “A Defence of Nonsense, and Other Essays” (1901), in which he says that nonsense and faith are “the two supreme symbolic assertions of truth” and “to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.”

Many readers value Chesterton’s fiction most highly. The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), a romance of civil war in suburban London, was followed by the loosely knit collection of short stories, The Club of Queer Trades (1905), and the popular allegorical novel The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908). But the most successful association of fiction with social judgment is in Chesterton’s series on the priest-sleuth Father Brown: The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), followed by The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914), The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), The Secret of Father Brown (1927), and The Scandal of Father Brown (1935).

Chesterton’s friendships were with men as diverse as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, and Max Beerbohm. The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton was published in 1936. (Copied from Encyclopedia Britannica.)

ADDITIONAL BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
There is more biographical information on Chesterton on New World Encyclopedia and Wikipedia.

AUTHOR'S BIBLIOGRAPHY
A list of Chesterton's writings are listed here.

e-books available free on Project Gutenberg.

FURTHER READING
It was difficult to find information on Chesterton that did not have a Christian/Catholic slant due his devout beliefs. I don't mean for this topic to be polarizing or controversial.

ARTICLES
Who is this Guy and Why Haven’t I Heard of Him?

G.K. Chesterton An Overlooked Literary Giant

5 Tips on how to read G.K. Chesterton

The Seven Most Popular G.K. Chesterton Quotes He Never Said

5 Big Things To Know And Celebrate About G.K. Chesterton

The Back of the World

A Most Unlikely Saint

WEBSITES
The American Chesterton Society

Thanks for the info.

What is the reading schedule for Man Who?

It will begin on Sept 17 and run for three week, ending on October 7.

Wow! Thanks for all the links, Gem! I'll try to get through at least some of them before we start, as the articles look very interesting. I'm as unreligious as they come, but (and?) I find others' religious beliefs and the influence they have on their lives / works fascinating.

I've read some of the Father Brown stories in the past, but I can't remember much about them. TMWWT is a new one for me, so I'm really looking forward to it.

A privately run Catholic high school started in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park in 2015. It emphasizes reading the classics, requires uniforms and has no computers or technology.
The school is called G.K. Chesterton Academy since "as a literary genius, and a stellar example of Christian charity, Chesterton is a perfect model on which to develop an education. . . We are preparing our children for both temporal life and eternal life: to be good citizens and to be saints." There appears to be another such school in the Minneapolis area and in Buffalo.