Hefty, scholarly biography does not ignore Chesterton's quirky side

From The Catholic Sentinel-

Any adjective denoting great size — gargantuan, titanic, huge — seems to apply aptly not only to the literary output of G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton but to his physical appearance as well. Chesterton, best known today as the author of the Father Brown stories, was 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed close to 300 pounds. He usually wore a cape and walked with a sword in his hand and a cigar in his mouth.

In his writing career, which spanned the years 1895 to 1936, he wrote 80 books, hundreds of poems, 200 short stories and more than 4,000 essays. He wrote literary and art criticism, detective novels, political commentary and Christian apologetics. Chesterton could dictate without hesitation a complete essay to the exact word count required by the newspaper or magazine's requirements.

Ian Ker's new biography of Chesterton is the first in several decades. It is a scholarly biography with perceptive analysis of his major works of apologetics — "Orthodoxy," "The Everlasting Man," "St. Francis of Assisi" and "St. Thomas Aquinas" — but it does not ignore the quirky humanity of Chesterton. Chesterton could produce penetrating criticism of Dickens, but he frequently lost his way on trains and would have to telegraph his wife to find out where he was and how to get home.

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