Chesterton, G K

Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith)

G.K. Chesterton, chalk drawing by James Gunn, 1932; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

(credit: Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London)

(born May 29, 1874, London, Eng.—died June 14, 1936, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire) British man of letters. Chesterton was a journalist, a scholar, a novelist and short-story writer, and a poet. His works of social and literary criticism include Robert Browning (1903), Charles Dickens (1906), and The Victorian Age in Literature (1913). Even before his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922, he was interested in theology and religious argument. His fiction includes The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), the popular allegorical novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), and his most successful creation, the series of detective novels featuring the priest-sleuth Father Brown.