Search - List of Books by G. K. Chesterton

Dear Sirs,

I am.

Sincerely yours,

G. K. Chesterton

The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.

The worship of will is the negation of will. . . If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, "Will something", that is tantamount to saying, "I do not mind what you will", and that is tantamount to saying, "I have no will in the matter." You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular.

Thus when Mr. H. G. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different", he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."

The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless ... one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is ... well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.

All healthy men, ancient and modern, Western and Eastern, hold that there is in sex a fury that we cannot afford to inflame; and that a certain mystery must attach to the instinct if it is to continue delicate and sane.

For the great Gaels of IrelandAre the men that God made mad,For all their wars are merry,And all their songs are sad.

See Also G. K.'s Weekly.

• Chesterton's The Everlasting Man contributed to C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity. In a letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950) Lewis calls the book "the best popular apologetic I know", and to Rhonda Bodle he wrote (31 December 1947) "the [very] best popular defence of the full Christian position I know is G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man." The book was also cited in a list of 10 books that "most shaped his vocational attitude and philosophy of life."
• Chesterton's biography of Charles Dickens was largely responsible for creating a popular revival for Dickens's work as well as a serious reconsideration of Dickens by scholars.
• Chesterton's writings have been praised by such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Harold Bloom, Frederick Buechner, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Karel ?apek, Alan Watts, David Dark, Paul Claudel, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Andrew Greeley, Sigrid Undset, Ronald Knox, Kingsley Amis, W. H. Auden, Anthony Burgess, E. F. Schumacher, Orson Welles, Dorothy Day, Gene Wolfe, Tim Powers, John Shirley, Garry Wills, H.L. Mencken, David D. Friedman, Neil Gaiman, Michael Crichton and Franz Kafka.
• Philip Yancey said that if he were "stranded on a desert island and could choose only one book apart from the Bible, I may well select Chesterton's own spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy."
• Chesterton's novel The Man Who Was Thursday inspired the Irish Republican leader Michael Collins with the idea: 'if you didn't seem to be hiding nobody hunted you out.'
• Chesterton's column in the Illustrated London News on September 18, 1909 had a profound effect on Mahatma Gandhi. P. N. Furbank asserts that Gandhi was "thunderstruck" when he read it, while Martin Green notes that "Gandhi was so delighted with this that he told Indian Opinion to reprint it."
• His physical appearance and apparently some of his mannerisms were a direct inspiration for the character of Dr. Gideon Fell, a well-known fictional detective created in the early 1930s by the Anglo-American mystery writer John Dickson Carr.
• The author Neil Gaiman has stated that The Napoleon of Notting Hill was an important influence on his own book Neverwhere, and used a quote from it as an epigraph to that novel. Gaiman also based the character Gilbert, from the comic book The Sandman, on Chesterton, as well as featuring a quotation from The Man who was Thursday, a book Chesterton wrote "only in dreams", at the end of Season of Mists. In his short story October in the Chair, Gaiman's description of the anthropomorphized titular month is modeled on Chesterton. Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens is dedicated "to the memory of G.K. Chesterton: A man who knew what was going on." In a prescript to his novel, Coraline, Gaiman quotes Chesterton: "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
• Ingmar Bergman considered Chesterton's little known play Magic to be one of his favourites and even staged a production in Swedish. Later he reworked Magic into his movie The Magician in 1958.
• The Third Way campaigns for the widespread ownership of property are inspired by the economic system Chesterton espoused: Distributism.
• The Innocence of Father Brown is cited by Guillermo Martinez as one of the inspirations for his thriller The Oxford Murders.
• Extracts from The Man Who Was Thursday appear throughout the computer game Deus Ex in books the player character can read from.
• The Chesterton Society has proposed him to be beatified.

• Free audio recordings of the works of GK Chesterton from LibriVox.org

• The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) text
• Heretics (1905) ISBN 978-0-766-17476-4
• Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906)
• The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) text
• Orthodoxy (1908) Doubleday, 1991. ISBN 978-0-385-01536-3
• The Ballad Of The White Horse (1911) poetry
• Manalive (1912)
• Father Brown short stories (detective fiction)
• Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)
• Saint Francis of Assisi (1923), Doubleday, 1987. ISBN 978-0-385-02900-1
• The Everlasting Man (1925)
• Saint Thomas Aquinas (1933), Doubleday, 1974. ISBN 978-0-385-09002-5

• Braybrooke, Patrick, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1922.
• Cooney, A., G.K. Chesterton, One Sword at Least, Third Way Publications, London, 1999. ISBN 0-9535077-1-8
• Coren, M., Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton, Paragon House, New York, 1990.
• ffinch, M., G. K. Chesterton, 1986
• Kenner, H., Paradox in Chesterton, 1947.
• Paine, R., The Universe and Mr. Chesterton, Sherwood Sugden, 1999. ISBN 0893855111
• Pearce, J, Wisdom and Innocence — A Life of G.K.Chesterton, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996. ISBN 0-340-67132-7
• Ward, M., Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Sheed & Ward, 1944.
• Marshall McLuhan wrote an article on G.K. Chesterton, titled "G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic" (Dalhousie Review 15 (4), 1936).
• EWTN features a television series, G. K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense, that focuses on Chesterton and his works.

Sources

• Works by G. K. Chesterton in audio format from LibriVox
• Works by G. K. Chesterton at Internet Archive
• Works by G. K. Chesterton at Wikilivres (Warning: Works written after 1923 are copyright protected in the United States.)
• Works by G. K. Chesterton at the Online Books Page
• Essays by G. K. Chesterton at Quotidiana.org
• Martin Ward An extensive collection of e-text links
• G. K. Chesterton's introduction to Creatures that Once were Men, a collection of stories by Maxim Gorky in English translation (1905)

Other

• Portraits of G. K. Chesterton in the National Portrait Gallery .
• Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Patrick Braybrooke
• G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study by Julius West
• A teenaged GK Chesterton is the hero in The Young Chesterton Chronicles, Volume I: The Tripods Attack!, a science fiction/ alternative history adventure series, written by John McNichol and published by Imagio Catholic Fiction, an imprint of Sophia Institute Press
• The American Chesterton Society
• Gilbert Magazine: a magazine about Chesterton and topics of interest
• G.K. Chesterton Discussion Forum: An independent arena for discussing Gilbert Keith Chesterton
• Chesterton.ru G. K. Chesterton in Russian
• The Section on G. K. Chesterton at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
• Bibliography of detective fiction 1st Editions
• Chesterton House: A Center for Christian Studies at Cornell University
• The Chesterton Review: published by the Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture at Seton Hall University
• His Parish Church in Beaconsfield where he is buried
• Chesterton and Friends, a little blog dedicated to Chesterton
• The Hebdomadal Chesterton, a weekly blog of excerpts from Chesterton's writings
• Chesterton sites
• G. K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense Produced by EWTN — MP3 Audio Archives include 28 Episodes with an overview of Chesterton
• Brief Chesterton biography & bibliography
• Index entry for G.K. Chesterton at Poets' Corner