G.K. Chesterton

(1874 - 1936)

The exceptionally prolific and rotund English critic and author G.K. Chesterton was born in London, educated at St. Paul’s School, and briefly attended art school and University College, London, but graduated from neither. As a journalist he argued for economic distributism based off Catholic social teaching in his book What’s Wrong with the World; as a literary critic he wrote fine studies of Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw, among others; as a poet he wrote the famous “Lepanto” on the defeat of the Ottoman fleet in 1571; as a Christian apologist he wrote Orthodoxy, in 1909, considered a classic of the field; and as a fiction writer he wrote a series of mystery stories for his priest-sleuth Father Brown.