GC

G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

4 books in the library

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English writer, born in Kensington, London. After studying art at the Slade School he turned to journalism, and became one of the most prolific and popular writers of his day, producing essays, poems, novels, biographies and literary criticism, as well as a weekly column for decades. He is best remembered for the Father Brown stories, about an unassuming Catholic priest who solves crimes through his understanding of human nature, which began with The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), and for the novels The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). In Orthodoxy (1908) and The Everlasting Man (1925) he defended Christian belief, and in 1922 he was received into the Catholic Church. Famous for his paradoxes and his good-humoured public debates with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, he died at Beaconsfield in 1936.