June 14, 1936

G. K. Chesterton, (May29, 1874 to June 14, 1936) was an English writer. He lives on in the public imagination as the author of the Father Brown detective stories and an apologist for Anglicanism and then Roman Catholicism. He was a witty learned man, and I like to remember he, and Baring and Belloc were dear friends. But when I try to read him, and encounter some of that gentleman's antisemitism it just makes me want to puke.

Here is a gloss on his appeal by D. B. Wyndham Lewis, who is NOT the Vorticist artist of that name. In fact, they are not even related, apparently. Lewis edited an anthology of Chesterton's writing, G. K. Chesterton: An Anthology. (1957) Here is Lewis on the popularity of Chesterton's fiction for a general audience.

It is no discredit to them that psychologies and philosophies had not sated their need for the rush of a climax and the fascination of a riddle. It would be as reasonable to blame men for not accepting cats as watch-dogs, or using pocket-knives as fire-irons. Men must have detective stories; they must have farces and melodramas and comic songs...