A Miscellany of Men
G.K. Chesterton
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Dec. 14, 2014)
A Miscellany of Men is a classic text from G.K. Chesterton is a collection of humorous short stories and English essays which includes:The suffragist -- The poet and the cheese -- The thing -- The man who thinks backwards -- The nameless man -- The gardener and the guinea -- The voter and the two voices -- The mad official -- The enchanted man -- The sun worshipper -- The wrong incendiary -- The free man -- The hypothetical householder -- The priest of spring -- The real journalist -- The sentimental Scot -- The sectarian of society -- The fool -- The conscript and the crisis -- The miser and his friends -- The mystagogue -- The red reactionary -- The separatist and sacred things -- The Mummer -- The aristocratic 'arry -- The new theologian -- The romantic in the rain -- The false photographer -- The sultan -- The architect of spears -- The man on top -- The other kind of man -- The mediaeval villain -- The divine detective -- The elf of Japan -- The chartered libertine -- The contented man -- The angry author: his farewell.Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936), was an English writer, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, orator, lay theologian, biographer, and literary and art critic. Chesterton is often referred to as the "prince of paradox".Time magazine has observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out. Chesterton is well known for his fictional priest-detective Father Brown,[5] and for his reasoned apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man.[4][6] Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox" Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, his "friendly enemy", said of him, "He was a man of colossal genius."[4] Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin. Chesterton was born in Campden Hill in Kensington, London, the son of Marie Louise, née Grosjean, and Edward Chesterton.[8][9] He was baptised at the age of one month into the Church of England,[10] though his family themselves were irregularly practising Unitarians.[11]According to his autobiography, as a young man Chesterton became fascinated with the occultand, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards. Chesterton was educated at St Paul's School, then attended the Slade School of Art to become an illustrator. The Slade is a department of University College London, where Chesterton also took classes in literature, but did not complete a degree in either subject.In September 1895 Chesterton began working for the London publisher Redway, where he remained for just over a year.[14] In October 1896 he moved to the publishing house T. Fisher Unwin,[14] where he remained until 1902. During this period he also undertook his first journalistic work, as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1902 the Daily News gave him a weekly opinion column, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in The Illustrated London News, for which he continued to write for the next thirty years.Early on Chesterton showed a great interest in and talent for art. He had planned to become an artist, and his writing shows a vision that clothed abstract ideas in concrete and memorable images. Even his fiction contained carefully concealed parables. Father Brown is perpetually correcting the incorrect vision of the bewildered folks at the scene of the crime and wandering off at the end with the criminal to exercise his priestly role of recognition and repentance.