Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Notable Works

• The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) Ward, M. (ed.)
• The Innocence of Father Brown (1911)
• The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922) Simon & Brown

About

Gilbert Keith (GK) Chesterton was born in Kensington, London, in 1874. His father was an estate agent, and his mother, Marie Louise, was Swiss-French. He was educated at St Paul’s School, then Slade School of Art, to become an illustrator. From 1895, Chesterton wrote weekly opinion columns in The Daily News and then later for The Illustrated London News and continued this weekly journalism for the next thirty years. He wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, 200 short stories, 4,000 essays (mostly newspaper columns) and several plays. His books, stories and articles encompassed history, theology, criticism, crime and mystery fiction. He created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown and was elected the first president of the Detection Club of British mystery authors, serving from 1930 to 1936. Chesterton enjoyed public debates with other writers such as George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow.

He married Frances Blogg in 1901 and credited her with leading him back to Anglicanism, though he later became Catholic. During his lifetime, Chesterton faced accusations of antisemitism for caricatures of Jews in his work. In The New Jerusalem, he wrote that “Jews should be represented by Jews, should live in a society of Jews, should be judged by Jews and ruled by Jews. I am an Anti-Semite if that is Anti-Semitism. It would seem more rational to call it Semitism”. He expressed his abhorrence of Adolf Hitler’s rule almost as soon as it started. Rabbi Stephen Samuel wrote in a posthumous tribute to Chesterton in 1937: “When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit”.

Legacy

His gift of Copyright to the RLF from his literary estate helps support future generations of writers.