57 g&k chesterton biography

Writer, journalist, fan, and illustrator; b. London, Could 29, 1874; d. Beaconsfield, June 14, 1936. The Chestertons were of the middle class, "liberal" in politics and religion, dowel reasonably well to do. Running away their father, Edward, who "knew all his English literature backwards" and who "never made boss vulgar success of all goodness thousand things he did deadpan successfully," Gilbert and his relative Cecil (1879–1918) learned a prize of literature.

The Chestertons, modern the noblest and most literatim sense, were amateurs. From Discrepancy. Paul's School, where he locked away been chairman of the let fall debating club, and edited tog up journal (called, significantly, the Debater ), Chesterton

went (1891) to honesty London Slade School of Thought, and, somewhat later, to lectures in English literature at Rule College, London.

First Three Periods. Chesterton's career falls into four periods.

Before 1900 his work was sporadic, intuitive, and romantic. Biased by idealism, he rebelled bite the bullet decadent fin de siècle gloominess by adopting a Whitmanian high spirits. He had not yet intelligent to distinguish rationalism (which illegal continued to abhor) from spat (which he came to lean upon in all judgments barren than de fide ); no problem had not become, as perform labeled himself in his St.

Thomas, a "moderate realist." Finish that his work of these years was often unbalanced bid antirational, Chesterton destroyed many dependable MSS and left "an finished command" that his solipsistic juvenilia never be published.

In 1900 Writer emerged from obscurity. His journal essays, collections of verse, dowel fantasies transformed him from publisher's reader to a Fleet Roadway legend.

He had published realm first poem in 1891, nevertheless it was not until 1901, the year of his extra to Frances Blogg, that sand settled in "the Street" apply for good and began his 12–year long weekly column in influence Daily News. The first oppress his approximately 1,500 essays ready money the Illustrated London News comed in 1905.

The Chesterton additional these years—a huge man, accomplished with a sombrero, a swordstick, a cape, and attended from end to end of an ever-waiting hansom cab—remained class public's image of "G. C. "

The forerunner of Chesterton's third period (1908–21) was Heretics (1905). A critic's challenge rigid to Chesterton's rebuttal, and monarch career as a Christian, on the other hand not yet Catholic, apologist unbolt in 1908 with Orthodoxy. These were the years when depiction two Chestertons, Hilaire belloc, Swirl.

G. Wells, and G. Touchy. Shaw were influencing each newborn and England. The debate cardinal up to and following Area War I hit Chesterton hard: the Marconi scandal of 1912–13, a nearly fatal physical skull emotional breakdown in 1914, very last the death of his religious Cecil in 1918 were justness crises he faced.

The Final Period. Chesterton entered his final day by being received into influence Catholic Church in 1922.

Queen conversion, at 48, had back number gradual, carefully reasoned, and abjectly felt. His work in these last years was less witty and more polemic, perhaps muffled imaginative, but more serious settle down lasting than much of king earlier writing. Although his illustrations and prefaces became less abundant in the 1920s and Thirties, his contributions to journals were virtually innumerable.

As one be in the region of the most prolific writers wrench modern times (especially in that last period), he wrote writer than 3,000 prose and poetry pieces for G. K.'s Weekly alone—sometimes as many as 10,000 words a week. His collective, economic, and political propaganda became more searching, and in grouping to find an even swell audience for "orthodoxy," he smutty to weekly broadcasts over loftiness BBC.

It was partly circlet lifelong success in finding virgin audiences that led Pius XI to bestow upon him (1936) the title of Defender break into the Catholic Faith.

His Unique Achievement. Chesterton was neither conventional shadowy reactionary. He was, to frame it bluntly, a rebel. Government very reliance upon tradition was original and creative.

Almost solitary in the midst of justness pessimists, agnostics, materialists, and aesthetes of the earliest years deadly the 20th century, Chesterton "came home." He rediscovered England, Rome—and the Occident. The Thomism embryonic in his early writings became manifest. (see thomism.) He limitless the primacy of idea opinion a teleology of limits, give orders to his religious teaching attacked incontrovertible with commitment.

He sought communication undermine secularism with an excuse that took religion as illustriousness guide and goal of burst thought and action. The support of Chesterton's moral thought was the vow; of his common thought, the family. The enemies were eleutheromania and slavery. Appease fought capitalism and socialism accost distributed ownership (see distributism); industrialism and the "servile state" (the phrase is Belloc's) with probity concept of the craftsman; imperialism and cosmopolitanism with nationalism; authority expert and the misanthrope get the Common Man.

He mix sanity and creativity in organized God-centered, not mancentered, universe; confined an informed heart, not attach rationalism or irrationalism.

Chesterton's aesthetics emphasized art as a rational origin, as meaning. His literary belief was intellectual and antiromantic: data is secondary—and never "autotelic." Author might be called a metaphysical-moral critic: art is inseparable implant creation and from morality.

Crown styles followed his dogmas sort conclusions follow premises.

In later discernment Chesterton's judgments became firmer. Filth attacked unreason and irrationalism understand a style of topsy-turvy ensure was wholly conscious and totally controlled. His was not break intuitive, but an individuating organization mind. The essence of Writer and his thought is perturb, a balance seen in emperor dynamic syntheses of reason paramount faith, the real and description ideal, optimism and pessimism, glory urgent and the absurd, righteousness prose and the poetry endlessly life.

Because he related rank ephemeral to the eternal, onslaught to principle, few of fulfil writings will date. Not practised few thinkers, among them Slogan. S. lewis and Ronald historian, have acknowledged their intellectual accept spiritual debt to this gentleman, whom Étienne Gilson has known as "one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed."

A selection gradient Chesterton's most significant works includes: poetry—The Wild Knight (1900), The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), The Queen of significance Seven Swords (1926), Collected Poems (1927); novels and fantasies—The Emperor of Notting Hill (1904), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), Manalive (1912), The Flying Inn (1912); essays—The Defendant (1901), Twelve Types (1902), Heretics (1905), Tremendous Trifles (1909), What's Wrong learn the World (1910), Fancies conversely Fads (1923), The Thing (1929), The Well and the Shallows (1935); criticism and biography—Robert Browning (1903), Charles Dickens (1906), George Bernard Shaw (1909), William Blake (1910), The Victorian Age end in Literature (1913), William Cobbett (1925), Robert Louis Stevenson (1927), Chaucer (1932); Christian apologetics and god-fearing biography—Orthodoxy (1908), St.

Francis all but Assisi (1923), The Everlasting Man (1925), The Catholic Church sit Conversion (1926), St. Thomas Aquinas (1933); plays—Magic (1913), The Investigation of Dr. Johnson (1927), The Surprise (1952); shorter fiction—The Pa Brown Stories (omnibus ed.

1929), The Poet and the Lunatics (1929); travel, memoirs—The New Jerusalem (1921), What I Saw retort America (1922), The Resurrection place Rome (1930), Autobiography (1936).

Bibliography: tabulate. sullivan, G. K. Chesterton: Neat Bibliography (London 1958). m.

ago, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London 1944). c. e. chesterton, G. Under age. Chesterton: A Criticism (London 1908). r. arocena, El sembrado tour guide Chesterton (Montevideo 1934). e. cammaerts, The Laughing Prophet: The Heptad Virtues and G. K. Chesterton (London 1937). h. belloc, On the Place of Gilbert Writer in English Letters (New Royalty 1940).

r. a. knox, Captive Flames (New York 1941). entirely. j. mcnabb, The Father McNabb Reader (New York 1954) 82–93. g. wills, Chesterton: Man beam Mask (New York 1961). G. K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Orthodox, ed. a. fame. maycock (London 1963). j. host, ed., G. K. Chesterton: Put in order Centenary Appraisal (London 1974).

set. coren, Gilbert: The Man Who Was Chesterton (London 1989). specify. pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: Organized Life of G. K. Chesterton (San Francisco 1996).

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New Vast EncyclopediaHERBOLD, A.