Chesterton - by Garry Wills (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Look out for a new book from Garry Wills, What The Qur'an Meant, coming fall 2017.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg and Papal Sin captures the many dimensions of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers.

Part of a literary circle that included H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Hillaire Belloc, and Max Beerbohm, G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) wrote essays of social criticism for contemporary journals, literary criticism (including notable books on Browning, Dickens, and Shaw), and works of theology and religious argument, but may have been best known for his Father Brown mysteries. Chesterton's interest in Catholic Christianity, first expressed in Orthodoxy, led to his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1922. His classic Saint Francis of Assisi and the equally acclaimed Saint Thomas Aquinas confirmed his reputation as a writer with the rare ability to simultaneously entertain, inform, and enlighten readers. This revised edition of Garry Wills's finely crafted biography includes updates to the text and a new Introduction by the author.

Review Quotes

"In this short and frequently brilliant book, Garry Wills undertakes to restore our interest in Chesterton. . . as an essentially serious writer whose intellectual development, to say nothing of his ethical and religious opinions, is distinctly worth reappraisal."
--New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Garry Wills is a historian and the author of the New York Times bestsellers What Jesus Meant, Papal Sin, Why I Am a Catholic, and Why Priests?, among others. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and other publications, Wills is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.