harles Dickens and St. Francis of Assisi
often contain brilliant insights into their subjects. His Father Brown
mystery stories, written between 1911 and 1936, are still being read
and adapted for television.
His politics fitted with his deep distrust of concentrated wealth and
power of any sort. Along with his friend Hilaire Belloc and in books
like the 1910 "What's Wrong with the World" he advocated a view called
"Distributionism" that was best summed up by his expression that every
man ought to be allowed to own "three acres and a cow." Though not known
as a political thinker, his political influence has circled the world.
Some see in him the father of the "small is beautiful" movement and a
newspaper article by him is credited with provoking Gandhi to seek a
"genuine" nationalism for India rather than one that imitated the
British.
Heretics belongs to yet another area of literature at which Chesterton
excelled. A fun-loving and gregarious man, he was nevertheless
troubled in his adolescence by thoughts of suicide. In Christianity he
found the answers to the dilemmas and paradoxes he saw in life. Other
books in that same series include his 1908 Orthodoxy (written in
response to attacks on this book) and his 1925 The Everlasting Man.
Orthodoxy is also available as electronic text.
Chesterton died on the 14th of June, 1936 in Beaconsfield,
Buckinghamshire, England. During his life he published 69 books and at
least another ten based on his writings have been published after his
death. Many of those books are still in print. Ignatius Press is
systematically publishing his collected writings.
Table of Contents
1. Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Othodoxy
2. On the Negative Spirit
3. On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small
4. Mr. Bernard Shaw
5. Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants
6. Christmas and the Esthetes
7. Omar and the Sacred Vine
8. The Mildness of the Yellow Press
9. The Moods of Mr. George Moore
10. On Sandals and Simplicity
11. Science and the Savages
12. Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson
13. Celts and Celtophiles
14. On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family
15. On Smart Novelists and the Smart Set
16. On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity
17. On the Wit of Whistler
18. The Fallacy of the Young Nation
19. Slum Novelists and the Slums
20. Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy
I. Introd
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