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G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) Author Page | Ignatius Insight
Articles By and About G. K. Chesterton
Ignatius Press Books about G. K. Chesterton
Books by G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton: "Who is this guy and why havent I heard
of him?"
A pithy bio of G.K. Chesterton by Dale Ahlquist, President, American
Chesterton Society
Ive heard the question more than once. It is asked by people who have
just started to discover G.K. Chesterton. They have begun reading a Chesterton
book, or perhaps have seen an issue of Gilbert! Magazine, or maybe
theyve only encountered a series of pithy quotations that marvelously
articulate some forgotten bit of common sense. They ask the question with
a mixture of wonder, gratitude and . . . resentment. They are amazed by
what they have discovered. They are thankful to have discovered it. And
they are almost angry that it has taken so long for them to make the discovery.
"Who is this guy. . .?"
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) cannot be summed up in one sentence.
Nor in one paragraph. In fact, in spite of the fine
biographies that have
been written of him, (and his Autobiography)
he has never been captured between the covers of one book. But rather than
waiting to separate the goats from the sheep, lets just come right
out and say it: G.K. Chesterton was the best writer of the twentieth century.
He said something about everything and he said it better than anybody else.
But he was no mere wordsmith. He was very good at expressing himself, but
more importantly, he had something very good to express. The reason he was
the greatest writer of the twentieth century was because he was also the
greatest thinker of the twentieth century.
Born in London, Chesterton was educated at St. Pauls, but never went
to college. He went to art school. In 1900, he was asked to contribute a
few magazine articles on art criticism, and went on to become one of the
most prolific writers of all time. He wrote a hundred books, contributions
to 200 more, hundreds of poems, including the
epic Ballad of the White Horse, five plays, five novels,
and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring
the priest-detective, Father Brown. In spite of his literary accomplishments,
he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper
essays, including 30
years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News,
and 13 years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited
his own newspaper, G.K.s Weekly. (To put it into perspective,
four thousand essays is the equivalent of writing an essay a day, every
day, for 11 years. If youre not impressed, try it some time. But they
have to be good essays, all of them, as funny as they are serious, and as
readable and rewarding a century after youve written them.)
Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history,
politics, economics, philosophy, and theology. His style is unmistakable,
always marked by humility, consistency, paradox, wit, and wonder. His writing
remains as timely and as timeless today as when it first appeared, even
though much of it was published in throw away paper.
This man who composed such profound and perfect lines as "The Christian
ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult
and left untried," stood 64" and weighed about 300 pounds,
usually had a cigar in his mouth, and walked around wearing a cape and a
crumpled hat, tiny glasses pinched to the end of his nose, swordstick in
hand, laughter blowing through his moustache. And usually had no idea where
or when his next appointment was. He did much of his writing in train stations,
since he usually missed the train he was supposed to catch. In one famous
anecdote, he wired his wife, saying, "Am at Market Harborough. Where ought
I to be?" His faithful wife, Frances, attended to all the details of his
life, since he continually proved he had no way of doing it himself. She
was later assisted by a secretary, Dorothy Collins, who became the couples
surrogate daughter, and went on to become the writers literary executrix,
continuing to make his work available after his death.
This absent-minded, overgrown elf of a man, who laughed at his own jokes
and amused children at birthday parties by catching buns in his mouth, this
was the man who wrote a book called The
Everlasting Man, which led a young atheist named C.S. Lewis to become
a Christian. This was the man who wrote a novel called The Napoleon of
Notting Hill, which inspired Michael Collins to lead a movement for
Irish Independence. This was the man who wrote an essay in the Illustrated
London News that inspired Mohandas Gandhi to lead a movement to end
British colonial rule in India. This was a man who, when commissioned to
write a
book on St. Thomas Aquinas (aptly titled Saint Thomas Aquinas),
had his secretary check out a stack of books on St. Thomas from the library,
opened the top book on the stack, thumbed through it, closed it, and proceeded
to dictate a book on St. Thomas. Not just any book. The renowned Thomistic
scholar,
Etienne Gilson, had this to say about it:
"I consider it as being without possible comparison
the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can
account for such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that
it is a 'clever' book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or
thirty years in studying St. Thomas. . . cannot fail to perceive that
the so-called 'wit' of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame.
He has guessed all that which we had tried to demonstrate, and he has
said all that which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express
in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who
ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help
being right; but he could not either help being modest and charitable,
so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was
right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he
made up for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him."
Chesterton debated many of the celebrated intellectuals
of his time: George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Clarence
Darrow. According to
contemporary accounts, Chesterton usually emerged as the winner of these
contests, however, the world has immortalized his opponents and forgotten
Chesterton, and now we hear only one side of the argument, and we are enduring
the legacies of socialism, relativism, materialism, and skepticism. Ironically,
all of his opponents regarded Chesterton with the greatest affection. And
George Bernard Shaw said: "The world is not thankful enough for Chesterton.
His writing has been praised by Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Evelyn
Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Karel Capek, Marshall
McLuhan, Paul Claudel, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Sigrid Undset,
Ronald Knox, Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden, Anthony Burgess, E.F. Schumacher,
Neil Gaiman, and Orson Welles. To name a few.
T.S. Eliot said that Chesterton "deserves a permanent claim on our
loyalty."
". . . and why havent I heard of him?
There are three answers to this question:
- I dont know.
- Youve been cheated.
- Chesterton is the most unjustly neglected writer of
our time. Perhaps it is proof that education is too important to be
left to educators and that publishing is too important to be left
to publishers, but there is no excuse why Chesterton is no longer
taught in our schools and why his writing is not more widely reprinted
and especially included in college anthologies. Well, there is an
excuse. It seems that Chesterton is tough to pigeonhole, and if a
writer cannot be quickly consigned to a category, or to one-word description,
he risks falling through the cracks. Even if he weighs three hundred
pounds.
But there is another problem. Modern thinkers and commentators
and critics have found it much more convenient to ignore Chesterton rather
than to engage him in an argument, because to argue with Chesterton is
to lose.
Chesterton argued eloquently against all the trends that eventually took
over the twentieth century: materialism, scientific determinism, moral
relativism, and spineless agnosticism. He also argued against both socialism
and capitalism and showed why they have both been the enemies of freedom
and justice in modern society.
And what did he argue for? What was it he defended? He defended
"the common man" and common sense. He defended the poor. He
defended the family. He defended beauty. And he defended Christianity
and
the Catholic Faith. These dont play well in the classroom, in the
media, or in the public arena. And that is probably why he is neglected.
The modern world prefers writers who are snobs, who have exotic and bizarre
ideas, who glorify decadence, who scoff at Christianity, who deny the
dignity of the poor, and who think freedom means no responsibility.
But even though Chesterton is no longer taught in schools,
you cannot consider yourself educated until you have thoroughly read Chesterton.
And furthermore, thoroughly reading Chesterton is almost a complete education
in itself. Chesterton is indeed a teacher, and the best kind. He doesnt
merely astonish you. He doesnt just perform the wonder of making
you think. He goes beyond that. He makes you laugh.
(Reprinted by kind permission of Dale Ahlquist
and the American Chesterton
Society.)
Dale
Ahlquist is the president and co-founder of the American
Chesterton Society.
He is the creator and host of the television series, G.K. Chesterton:
The Apostle of Common Sense, on EWTN. Dale is the publisher of Gilbert
Magazine, author of The Chesterton University Student Handbook, editor
of The Gift of Wonder: The Many Sides of G.K. Chesterton, associate
editor of the Collected
Works of G.K. Chesterton (Ignatius). He has been called one
of the most respected Chesterton scholars in the world and has delighted
audiences around the country with his variety of talks on the great English
writer. He is a graduate of Carleton College (B.A.) in Northfield, Minnesota,
and Hamline University (M.A.) in St. Paul, Minnesota. He lives near Minneapolis
with his wife and five children. Like Chesterton, Dale is a Catholic convert
and a joyful defender of the Catholic Faith. He can be contacted at info@chesterton.org.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Excerpts and Articles
How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House | G. K. Chesterton | Chapter One
of Manalive
G.K. Chesterton, the Poet | Denis J. Conlon
St. Thomas More | G. K. Chesterton
A Simple Thought | G. K. Chesterton
The Problem of the Plantagenets | G. K. Chesterton
Chesterton and Orthodoxy | Carl E. Olson and Dale Ahlquist
Seeing With the Eyes of G.K. Chesterton | Dale Ahlquist
Recovering The Lost Art of Common Sense | Dale Ahlquist
Common Sense Apostle & Cigar Smoking Mystic | Dale Ahlquist
Chesterton and the "Paradoxy" of Orthodoxy | Carl E. Olson
The Attraction of Orthodoxy | Joseph Pearce
The Emancipation of Domesticity | G.K. Chesterton
The God in the Cave | G.K. Chesterton
What Is America? | G.K. Chesterton
Mary and the Convert | G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton and Saint Francis | Joseph Pearce
Chesterton and the Delight of Truth | James V. Schall, S.J.
The Life and
Theme of G.K. Chesterton | Randall Paine | An Introduction to The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton
Hot Water and Fresh Air: On Chesterton and His Foes | Janet E. Smith
ChesterBelloc | Ralph McInerny
Ignatius Press Books About Chesterton's Life and Work
  
  
Classic Works by G.K. Chesterton



The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton
Volume 1: Heretics, Orthodoxy, Blatchford Controversies
(Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 2: St. Francis, Everlasting Man, St. Thomas
(Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 3: The Catholic Church and Conversion; Where All
Roads Lead; The Well and the Shallows; and others. (Softcover)
Volume 4: What's Wrong with the World, Superstition of
Divorce, Eugenics and Other Evils (Softcover)
Volume 5: The Outline of Sanity, The End of The Armistice,
The Appetite of Tyranny, Utopia of Usurers, and more (Softcover)
Volume 6: To be published
Volume 7: The Ball and the Cross, Manalive, The Flying
Inn (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 8: The Man Who Knew Too Much, Tales of the Long
Bow, The Return of Don Quixote (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 9: To be published
Volume 10: Collected Poetry, Part 1 (Softcover)
Volume 10: Collected Poetry, Part 2 (Softcover |
Hardcover)
Volume 10: Collected Poetry, Part 3 (Softcover |
Hardcover)
Volume 11: Collected Plays and Chesterton on Shaw (Softcover)
Volume 12: Father Brown Stories, Part 1 (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 13: Father Brown Stories, Part 2 (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 14: Short Stories, Fairy Tales, Mystery Stories (Softcover)
Volume 15: Chesterton on Dickens (Softcover)
Volume 16: The Autobiography (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 17: To be published
Volume 18: Robert Louis Stevenson, Chaucer, Leo Tolstoy,
Thomas Carlyle (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 19: To be published
Volume 20: Christendom in Dublin, Irish Impressions, The
New Jerusalem, A Short History of England (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 21: What I Saw in America, The Resurrection of Rome,
Sidelights (Softcover)
Volume 22: To be published
Volume 23: To be published
Volume 24: To be published
Volume 25: To be published
Volume 26: To be published
Volume 27: Illustrated London News, 1905-1907 (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 28: Illustrated London News, 1908-1910 (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 29: Illustrated London News, 1911-1913 (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 30: Illustrated London News, 1914-1916 (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 31: Illustrated London News, 1917-1919 (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 32: Illustrated London News, 1920-1922 (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 33: Illustrated London News, 1923-1925 (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 34: Illustrated London News, 1926-1928 (Softcover
| Hardcover)
Volume 35: Illustrated London News, 1929-1931
Volume 36: Illustrated London News, 1932-1934 (Softcover
| Hardcover)
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