G.K. Chesterton was born in London and was associated with the journalistic and literary scene there all of his life, using its streets, traditions, people and legends as an integral part of his material. Probably best known today for his Father Brown stories, in which a witty Catholic priest pursues his sideline of solving murder mysteries, he wrote with humour and dexterity a wide range of poetry, essays, biography, novels, literary criticism and plays. ‘His pages abound in epigrams, sleights, witty word play, allusion and almost farcical polemic, but his seriousness in social and moral questions, and the flowing abundance of his imaginative energies, generated a zeal that make his best writings remarkably distinctive of their kind.’
Chesterton became a Roman Catholic in 1922 but had progressed toward this step through years of speculation and study. Several of his novels—The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday, Manalive, The Return of Don Quixote—are allegories revolving around the Christian gospel. Some of his essays, notably Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, are original and imaginative defences of the biblical Christian world view. The famous Christian apologist C.S. Lewis later acknowledged a great debt to G.K. Chesterton.