Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Happy birthday, G. K. Chesterton.

Renaissance man G. K. Chesterton---poet, critic, newspaper columnist, playwright, theologian, Detection Club member, and creator of that gentle but wise sleuth Father Brown---was born today in 1874. He died in 1936.

The 26th annual Chesterton Conference, scheduled for June 14-16 at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, will celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Man Who Was Thursday. Go here for the Mercury Theater radio production of The Man Who Was Thursday. Read Chesterton's comments about the novel here.

The Chesterton University decal comes from the American Chesterton Society. You can get it and a number of other Chesterton products here.

"The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life."--G. K. Chesterton, "A Defence of Detective Stories," The Defendant (1901)

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