Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874, in London of middle-class parents. Between 1887 and 1892, he attended St. Paul’s School, a private day school for boys. From 1892 to 1895, he studied at the Slade School of Art, a part of the University of London.

Chesterton did not distinguish himself academically, although evidence of his future greatness was present. When only sixteen, he organized a debating club, and in March of 1891 he founded the club’s magazine, The Debater. His limited talent as an artist bore fruit later in life, when he often illustrated his own books and those of close friends.

Prior to publication of his first two books in 1900, Chesterton contributed verse, book reviews, and essays to various periodicals, including the Bookman. He also did editorial work for two publishers between 1895 and 1901.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Chesterton was widely recognized as a serious journalist. Throughout his life, despite his fame as a novelist, literary critic, poet, biographer, historian, playwright, and even philosopher-theologian, he never described himself as anything other than a journalist.

In 1901, Chesterton married Frances Blogg, the eldest daughter of a London diamond merchant. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Beaconsfield, where they lived until his death on June 14, 1936. Chesterton published his first mystery collection, The Club of Queer Trades, in 1905. The first collection of Father Brown detective stories appeared in 1911. He was elected the first president of the Detection Club, an association of mystery writers, at its founding in 1929. The mystery and detective tales were but a small part of an immense and varied literary output. Chesterton published around one hundred books during his lifetime. His autobiography and ten volumes of essays were published posthumously. His journalistic pieces number into the thousands.

Chesterton was a colorful figure. Grossly overweight, he wore a black cape and a wide-brimmed floppy hat; he had a bushy mustache and carried a sword-stick cane. The public remembers him as the lovable and whimsical creator of Father Brown; scholars also remember him as one of the most prolific and influential writers of the twentieth century.

The English essayist, novelist, and poet Gilbert Keith Chesterton, was educated at St. Paul’s School, which he left in 1891 to study art before following his natural bent toward literature by producing his first book of poems, The Wild Knight, in 1900. In 1901, he married Frances Blogg and became a regular contributor to two leading newspapers. Chesterton regarded himself as a journalist, and nothing that was in the news of the day failed to get into his writing. From 1918 on, he edited G. K.’s Weekly.

Although Chesterton became famous for his ardent apologies on orthodox Anglican and Roman Catholic dogma and he himself converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922, he was a very tolerant man; two of his closest friends, H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, were nonbelievers. The general Christian truths he preached in Orthodoxy in 1908 he later also expounded in St. Thomas Aquinas in 1933. He was a controversial thinker whose “chief idea of life” was the awakening of wonder, or of an awareness of a thing as being seen for the first time. He became a master of paradox. He declared, for example, that “nothing succeeds like failure,” but he was referring to the “failure” of Calvary.

A prolific writer, Chesterton will be remembered longest, in all probability, for his literary criticisms (Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Chaucer) and for his penetrating religious analyses (St. Francis of Assisi, The Everlasting Man, and The Thing). A delightful light verse writer and illustrator, he was also a fine rhetorical poet. As a writer of fiction, he was perhaps most successful in the five volumes of his Father Brown detective stories, in which Father Brown relies on keen intuition and theological insights to solve crimes that baffle professional detectives. In all of his works, however, including three plays and innumerable essays, he hammers home Christian truths. Through his sociological books, What’s Wrong with the World and The Outline of Sanity, he became with Hilaire Belloc a leading exponent of the policy of economic and political decentralization known as “Distributism.”

Possessing a brilliant mind and a huge hulk of a body, this Christian humorist endeared himself to thousands through his writings and extensive lecture tours in Europe, America, and Palestine. His much-touted absent-mindedness and shaggy appearance lent themselves for the subject of innumerable cartoons and anecdotes.