Birthdays

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)

Author, editor, essayist, poet, philosopher, playwright, radio broadcaster, art critic, biographer, Christian apologist

Trained as an artist, Chesterton made his way into publishing and spent the first third of the twentieth century issuing an astonishing torrent of words: 80 books, hundreds of poems, 200 short stories, 4,000 essays, a number of plays, forty BBC broadcasts a year for the last five years of his life. He was universally accounted a genius, and engaged in friendly intellectual sparring, of a sort unknown today, with many of the other greats of his day, most notably, George Bernard Shaw.

Chesterton’s faith journey was a transit from a vaguely Unitarian family to C of E, then from high church, bells-and-smells Anglicanism to the Catholic Church in 1922. He adored the uses of paradox, and excelled in them, once writing: "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

A rather outlandish figure, 6’4 and nearly 300 pounds, chain-smoking cigars and always enfolded in a cape, brandishing a stick, Chesterton was usually lost in thought, often wiring his wife from train stations to ask where he was supposed to be at the time. He is best remembered, popularly, as the author of The Man Who Was Thursday and the Father Brown detective stories.

Related sites:

The American Chesterton Society

Project Gutenberg: Chesterton’s Works (free downloads)

Terence Hanbury White (1906-64)

Author

T.H. White read English at Cambridge, where his thesis was on Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. After four years as a schoolteacher, he moved to a remote cottage, where he lived off the grid and started writing. He produced 28 books over the next thirty years; most famous are his five novels recreating the life and times of King Arthur, The Once and Future King: The Sword in the Stone (1938); The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939); The Ill-Made Knight (1940); The Candle in the Wind (1958); and The Book of Merlyn (1977). His style is noted for the ability to range from comic to tragic, poetic to intellectual, all in the space of one book’s covers. His Arthur books were the source of the Broadway musical, Camelot (1960), and the Disney animated film, The Sword in the Stone (1963). His work has been cited by a variety of later writers, including J.K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, Gregory Maguire and crime writer Ed McBain.