The Essential G.K. Chesterton

by G.K. Chesterton

Illustrated with 10 unique and Discursions 1910All Things Considered 1908The Appetite of Tyranny 1915Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens 1911The Ballad of the White Horse 1911The Ball and The Cross 1909The Barbarism of Berlin 1914The Club of Queer Trades 1905The Crimes of England 1915The Defendant 1901Eugenics and Other Evils 1922George Bernard Shaw 1909Heretics 1905The Innocence of Father Brown 1911Lord Kitchener 1917Magic, A Fantastic Comedy 1913Manalive 1912The Man Who Knew Too Much 1922The Man Who Was Thursday 1908A Miscellany of Men 1912The Napoleon of Notting Hill 1904The New Jerusalem 1920Orthodoxy 1908Robert Browning 1903A Short History of England 1917Tremendous Trifles 1909Twelve Types 1902Utopia of Usurers and other Essays 1917Varied Types 1903The Victorian Age in Literature 1913What I Saw in America 1922What's Wrong With The World 1910The Wild Knight and Other Poems 1900The Wisdom of Father Brown 1914

Genres: Cultural, Amazon, Christian

4502 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic.

He was educated at St. Paul’s, and went to art school at University College London. In 1900, he was asked to contribute a few magazine articles on art criticism, and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote a hundred books, contributions to 200 more, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of the White Horse, five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father Brown. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and 13 years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly.

Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology.

Reviews

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read most of these works at least once before, but working through this massive volume is giving me the joy of reading them again, sometimes for the third or fourth time, in a new context.

This is not a great collection for a first time Chesterton reader, however. If you like fiction, start with the Father Brown Mysteries,which are light and easy to read, but will accustom you to the "Prince of Paradox". Next, The Man Who Was Thursday or The Ball and the Cross . Then the Non Fiction, maybe a few of his short essays and Manalive. These are all available free from several sources, Gutenberg.org and Amazon.com , and paid with more features.

I have this collection simply as a different way to read his great works, and to have all of them in one place.

[Michele]

Seems everywhere I turn there is another lovely, simple quote from GK Chesterton, so I'm heading to the source to see what I've been missing.