About G. K. Chesterton
 Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874, in London and died June 14, 1936, in Beaconsfield, a suburb of London in Buckinghamshire. Chesterton was schooled at St. Paul's. He went on to study art at the Slade School and while there attended literature courses at University College. He did not take a degree.
After leaving the Slade, Chesterton worked at low-level jobs in publishing before finding regular work as a freelance journalist, principally with The Bookman as an art critic and The Speaker, as a literary critic. He gained some notoriety at this time through his association with a group of writers who were opposed to the Boer War, a military excursion in South Africa that was popular with the British public. In June 18, 1901, he married his fiancé and one true love, Frances Blogg. In 1902 he was given a regular weekly column of opinion in London's Daily News, and his journalistic career was solidified when, in 1905, he was invited to contribute a weekly column to The Illustrated London News, a column he continued to write for the next thirty years.
When Chesterton's brother Cecil enlisted in 1916, Gilbert took over Cecil's weekly paper, The New Witness. Cecil died in France, and in 1925 Gilbert reorganized the publication as G.K.'s Weekly, which he continued to edit until his death. The newspaper was dedicated to promoting the cause of "Distributism," an economic system based on the social encyclicals of the popes, especially Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum.
Although he considered himself merely a "jolly journalist," the breadth and depth of Chesterton's thought was astonishing, and it's relevance for today is nothing short of uncanny. He was at once a poet, novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and master of the occasional essay, while his non-fiction essays and books made his reputation as a literary critic, a serious commentator on religion, a biographer, a travel writer, and a political radical. In his day, he was also admired as a lecturer and debater, an illustrator, and a popular BBC radio personality. He was remembered by his associates for his engaging personality, his immense girth, and his fabled absentmindedness. In 1922, at the age of forty-eight, after many years of explaining and defending Catholicism, Chesterton was himself received into the Roman Catholic Church.
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