IT is just a hundred years ago that one of the noblest and wittiest thinkers ever to write in our language, G. K. Chesterton, burst upon the scene with two masterworks. He is impossible to categorize in our specialized subject-area pigeonholes: He wrote vast amounts across a wide horizon, and must ultimately be categorized simply as a writer. In 1908 Chesterton published, among other things, two of the great works of modern literature, his novel The Man Who Was Thursday and his apologetic credo Orthodoxy. His essays and incidental journalism were also represented in a collection that same year, titled All Things Considered. Those who were already familiar with Chesterton knew him through his regular columns in the London Daily News and The Illustrated London News; in 1909 Mohandas Gandhi read one of his Illustrated London News columns, was deeply affected by it, translated it into Gujarati, and wrote a book based on it, Hind Swaraj, that gave a decisive shape to subsequent Indian national self-determination.
But although Chesterton had already made a literary mark before 1908-in his journalism, a novel, stories, apologetics, and now-classic studies of Robert Browning and Charles Dickens (“the most enlightening portrait of Dickens that I have ever read,” wrote V. S. Pritchett)-1908 was his annus mirabilis. The wise and witty Orthodoxy proved to be not only a classic nonsectarian defense of the Christian religion, and a forerunner to his admirer C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, but also a work for which large philosophical and scientific claims have subsequently been made by highly informed writers, including the physicist-philosopher Stanley L. Jaki and Martin Gardner-a longtime contributor to Scientific American and himself one of America’s “great intellects,” according to Douglas Hofstadter-who reprinted a large selection of Orthodoxy in his Great Essays in Science in 1957 and has since then been one of Chesterton’s chief proponents.
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