G k chestertons biography

Writer, journalist, apologist, good turn illustrator; b. London, May 29, 1874; d. Beaconsfield, June 14, 1936. High-mindedness Chestertons were of the middle aggregation, "liberal" in politics and religion, stake reasonably well to do. From their father, Edward, who "knew all top English literature backwards" and who "never made a vulgar success of concluded the thousand things he did to such a degree accord successfully," Gilbert and his brother Cecil (1879–1918) learned a love of belleslettres. The Chestertons, in the noblest professor most literal sense, were amateurs. Breakout St. Paul's School, where he challenging been chairman of the junior debating club, and edited its journal (called, significantly, the Debater ), Chesterton

went (1891) to the London Slade School stare Art, and, somewhat later, to lectures in English literature at University Academy, London.

First Three Periods. Chesterton's career avalanche into four periods. Before 1900 dominion work was sporadic, intuitive, and ideal. Swayed by idealism, he rebelled disagree with decadent fin de siècle pessimism dampen adopting a Whitmanian optimism. He confidential not yet learned to distinguish thought (which he continued to abhor) outlander reason (which he came to depend upon in all judgments less outshine de fide ); he had jumble become, as he labeled himself impede his St. Thomas, a "moderate realist." Realizing that his work of these years was often unbalanced and antirational, Chesterton destroyed many early MSS suggest left "an absolute command" that rule solipsistic juvenilia never be published.

In 1900 Chesterton emerged from obscurity. His paper essays, collections of verse, and fantasies transformed him from publisher's reader add up to a Fleet Street legend. He difficult to understand published his first poem in 1891, but it was not until 1901, the year of his marriage undertake Frances Blogg, that he settled block out "the Street" for good and began his 12–year long weekly column rework the Daily News. The first put his approximately 1,500 essays in ethics Illustrated London News appeared in 1905. The Chesterton of these years—a excessive man, equipped with a sombrero, clean up swordstick, a cape, and attended fail to notice an ever-waiting hansom cab—remained the public's image of "G. K. C. "

The forerunner of Chesterton's third period (1908–21) was Heretics (1905). A critic's difficult led to Chesterton's rebuttal, and enthrone career as a Christian, but moan yet Catholic, apologist opened in 1908 with Orthodoxy. These were the lifetime when the two Chestertons, Hilaire writer, H. G. Wells, and G. Dangerous. Shaw were influencing each other stake England. The debate leading up succumb to and following World War I success Chesterton hard: the Marconi scandal illustrate 1912–13, a nearly fatal physical remarkable emotional breakdown in 1914, and ethics death of his brother Cecil make money on 1918 were the crises he faced.

The Final Period. Chesterton entered his last period by being received into glory Catholic Church in 1922. His adjustment, at 48, had been gradual, circumspectly reasoned, and deeply felt. His reading in these last years was disappointing gay and more polemic, perhaps drive out imaginative, but more serious and durable than much of his earlier scribble. Although his illustrations and prefaces became less numerous in the 1920s slab 1930s, his contributions to journals were virtually innumerable. As one of description most prolific writers in modern nowadays (especially in this last period), take action wrote more than 3,000 prose survive verse pieces for G. K.'s Weekly alone—sometimes as many as 10,000 quarrel a week. His social, economic, duct political propaganda became more searching, streak in order to find an collected wider audience for "orthodoxy," he defiled to weekly broadcasts over the BBC. It was partly his lifelong good in finding new audiences that outside Pius XI to bestow upon him (1936) the title of Defender do admin the Catholic Faith.

His Unique Achievement. Writer was neither conventional nor reactionary. Do something was, to put it bluntly, tidy rebel. His very reliance upon ritual was original and creative. Almost pass up in the midst of the pessimists, agnostics, materialists, and aesthetes of authority earliest years of the 20th hundred, Chesterton "came home." He rediscovered England, Rome—and the Occident. The Thomism primordial in his early writings became obvious. (see thomism.) He taught the antecedence of idea and a teleology faultless limits, and his religious teaching stricken doubt with commitment. He sought respect undermine secularism with an apologia give it some thought took religion as the guide pivotal goal of all thought and marvellous. The core of Chesterton's moral dark was the vow; of his general thought, the family. The enemies were eleutheromania and slavery. He fought free enterprise and socialism with distributed ownership (see distributism); industrialism and the "servile state" (the phrase is Belloc's) with righteousness concept of the craftsman; imperialism topmost cosmopolitanism with nationalism; the expert move the misanthrope with the Common Subject. He found sanity and creativity fall to pieces a God-centered, not mancentered, universe; bank on an informed heart, not in reason or irrationalism.

Chesterton's aesthetics stressed art owing to a rational craft, as meaning. Crown literary theory was intellectual and antiromantic: literature is secondary—and never "autotelic." Author might be called a metaphysical-moral critic: art is inseparable from creation come first from morality. His styles followed wreath dogmas as conclusions follow premises.

In posterior life Chesterton's judgments became firmer. Fiasco attacked unreason and irrationalism with copperplate style of topsy-turvy that was entirely conscious and wholly controlled. His was not an intuitive, but an individuating synthesizing mind. The essence of Writer and his thought is balance, clever balance seen in his dynamic syntheses of reason and faith, the reach and the ideal, optimism and distrust, the urgent and the absurd, decency prose and the poetry of convinced. Because he related the ephemeral test the eternal, issue to principle, uncommon of his writings will date. Groan a few thinkers, among them Catch-phrase. S. lewis and Ronald knox, accept acknowledged their intellectual and spiritual debit to this man, whom Étienne Gilson has called "one of the private thinkers who ever existed."

A selection more than a few Chesterton's most significant works includes: poetry—The Wild Knight (1900), The Ballad longawaited the White Horse (1911), The Queen dowager of the Seven Swords (1926), Collected Poems (1927); novels and fantasies—The Bonaparte of Notting Hill (1904), The Gentleman 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 comprehend the World (1910), Fancies versus Fads (1923), The Thing (1929), The Achieve something and the Shallows (1935); criticism turf biography—Robert Browning (1903), Charles Dickens (1906), George Bernard Shaw (1909), William Blake (1910), The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), William Cobbett (1925), Robert Prizefighter Stevenson (1927), Chaucer (1932); Christian apologetics and religious biography—Orthodoxy (1908), St. Francis of Assisi (1923), The Everlasting Man (1925), The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926), St. Thomas Aquinas (1933); plays—Magic (1913), The Judgement of Dr. Johnson (1927), The Surprise (1952); shorter fiction—The Father Brown Stories (omnibus ed. 1929), The Poet and the Lunatics (1929); travel, memoirs—The New Jerusalem (1921), What I Saw in America (1922), The Resurrection of Rome (1930), Autobiography (1936).

Bibliography: j. sullivan, G. K. Chesterton: Uncut Bibliography (London 1958). m. ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London 1944). c. tie. chesterton, G. K. Chesterton: A Criticism (London 1908). r. arocena, El sembrado de Chesterton (Montevideo 1934). e. cammaerts, The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues and G. K. Chesterton (London 1937). h. belloc, On the Place work for Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters (New York 1940). r. a. knox, Captive Flames (New York 1941). v. particularize. mcnabb, The Father McNabb Reader (New York 1954) 82–93. g. wills, Chesterton: Man and Mask (New York 1961). G. K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Orthodox, ed. a. l. maycock (London 1963). j. sullivan, ed., G. K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal (London 1974). m. coren, Gilbert: The Male Who Was Chesterton (London 1989). document. pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Activity of G. K. Chesterton (San Francisco 1996).

[a. herbold]