Gilbert Keith Chesterton

This is the only biography of G.K. Chesterton written by someone who actually knew him, and it shows on every page. Maisie Ward, his friend and publisher, gives us not a monument but a man: the enormous thinker who filled 80 books with paradox and prose, who created Father Brown the priest-detective, who debated Shaw and Wells and everyone else in Edwardian London, who convertd from Anglicanism to Catholicism in 1922 and made that conversion the subject of some of the most joyful apologetics in English literature. Ward captures Chesterton's legendary warmth, his mountain of a body, his habit of lost umbrellas and late-night conversations, the mind that could dismantle an argument in one paragraph and write a children's fairy tale in the next. This is the biography for anyone who has read Orthodoxy or the Father Brown stories and wondered what kind of man could think that way, with that much delight, about faith and doubt and the strangeness of being alive.