The Everyman Chesterton: Edited and Introduced by Ian Ker (Everyman's Library Classics Series)

The first one-volume reader of the best of G. K. Chesterton’s writing in the full range of genres he mastered.

Chesterton was a towering literary figure of the early twentieth century, accomplished and prolific in many literary forms. A forceful proponent of Christianity and a critic of both conservatism and liberalism, he set out to describe nothing less than the spiritual journey of humanity in Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, his most enduring books. He is famous as well for his beloved Father Brown detective stories, his satirical and comic verse, his profoundly witty paradoxes and aphorisms, and his penetrating studies of such figures as Charles Dickens, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Thomas Aquinas. The Everyman Chesterton contains samples of his poems, stories, essays, and biographies, as well as the influential works of religious, political, and social thought in which he championed the common man and for which he is most admired.

Table of Contents:

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Hearsay Evidence
The Man with the Golden Key

CHARLES DICKENS
The Dickens Period
The Boyhood of Dickens
The Youth of Dickens
The Pickwick Papers
The Great Popularity
Dickens and America
Dickens and Christmas
The Time of Transition
Later Life and Works
The Great Dickens Characters
On the Alleged Optimism of Dickens
A Note on the Future of Dickens

THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies
The Great Victorian Novelists
The Great Victorian Poets

ORTHODOXY
Introduction in Defence of Everything Else
The Maniac
The Suicide of Thought
The Ethics of Elfland
The Flag of the World
The Paradoxes of Christianity
The Eternal Revolution
The Romance of Orthodoxy
Authority and the Adventurer

THE EVERLASTING MAN
Introduction: The Plan of This Book
The Riddles of the Gospel
The Strangest Story in the World
The Witness of the Heretics
The Escape from Paganism
The Five Deaths of the Faith
Conclusion: The Summary of This Book

ST THOMAS AQUINAS
On Two Friars
The Aristotelian Revolution
A Meditation on the Manichees
The Approach to Thomism
The Permanent Philosophy
The Sequel to St Thomas

FATHER BROWN STORIES
The Blue Cross
The Queer Feet
The Wrong Shape
The Resurrection of Father Brown
The Miracle of Moon Crescent
The Dagger with Wings
The Doom of the Darnaways
The Song of the Flying Fish
The Red Moon of Meru
The Chief Mourner of Marne
The Scandal of Father Brown
The Quick One
The Blast of the Book
The Green Man
The Crime of the Communist
The Vampire of the Village

POEMS
Wine and Water
Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom: An Ode
Elegy in a Country Churchyard
Lepanto
The Secret People
The Rolling English Road
The Donkey