G.K. Chesterton

29 May 1874 - 14 June 1936. Wrote popular (detective) novels, biographies, poems, pamphlets for the Great War and articles for newspapers.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on Campden Hill, Kensington, into a middle–class business family and had Swiss and Scottish ancestors. His family is described as "adventurers" who "were entirely of that period that believed in progress, and generally in new things, all the more because they were finding it increasingly difficult to believe in old things" (Ker 5). The first school he attended was Colet Court (Bewsher’s), a preparatory school, and changed later to St Paul’s School in 1883. In 1893 he attended University College London and studied art at the Slade School.

His first publications were two books of poetry: The Wild Knight (1900) and Greybeards at Play (1900). 28 June 1901 he married Frances Blogg.

In the early 1900s he wrote biographies of Robert Browning (1903), Charles Dickens (1906) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1907). His probably most popular character is Father Brown, who appears in 50 short stories, which were published between 1911 and 1935. The titles of the collections were The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), 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).

After the outbreak of the Great War, he was asked by the War Propaganda Bureau (WPB) to provide texts against Germany. And he did so, for example, The Barabarism in Berlin (1915) and The Crimes of England (1915). In 1922 he converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholism and published biographies of St Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas. He died June 14 1936 in Baconsfield.

Sources

Ker, Ian. G.K. Chesterton, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/index.html[1]

http://www.chesterton.org/wordpress[2]

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jchesterton.htm[3]

http://www.father-brown.de[4]

http://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/chesterton.htm[5]