The New Jerusalem (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was a larger-than-life writer who fascinates and perplexes us to this day.  An art student who became a poet, and then by turns a journalist, playwright, biographer, novelist, storyteller, philosopher, and “Christian apologist,” his fame rested on an uncanny ability to produce vast quantities of crystalline prose quickly and without apparent effort.  His fiction–particularly the Father Brown stories and the delirious suspense novel The Man Who Was Thursday–remains his most widely read and entertaining works.