British writer G.K. Chesterton struck a chord with readers in his day, authoring some 80 books and thousands of essays before his death in 1936. Now publishers in the United States are ready for him to be popular again, especially in Christian circles.
Today’s readers will find no shortage of new releases by and about Chesterton, who’s perhaps best known for his classic of Christian apologetics, Orthodoxy.
In January, Thomas Nelson published Kevin Belmonte’s Defiant Joy, a biographical look at Chesterton as a prolific Christian who shaped public discourse and society.A simultaneous release, The Quotable Chesterton (Thomas Nelson), serves up a selection of brief, witty insights on topics from academia to Emile Zola, culled from Belmonte’s research.
Others are helping seed what they hope will be a Chesterton revival. The Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton (Continuum, Jan.) offers another set of G.K.C.’s short takes on various topics. Readers hungry for longer works will find essays on Charles Dickens’s literature and other topics in The Everyman’s Chesterton (Everyman’s Library/ Knopf Group, April).
Spring will bring at least two more Chesterton offerings. Hendrickson in June will release two Chesterton novels, The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill, in a single volume. And British scholar Ian Ker’s G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (688 pages, $65) debuts in June from Oxford University Press.
“Chesterton is one figure that I think will always be of interest to students and scholars,” said OUP senior marketing manager Brian Hughes.
One driver of the Chesterton craze is cost. Much of his work exists in the public domain, including almost everything in The Quotable Chesterton, and is therefore publishable without having to pay for rights. Even more compelling, perhaps, is the prospect that Chesterton might bring a bold, unapologetic Christian voice to bear in a way that inspires people of faith today.
“By their own accounts, both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were tremendously influenced by Chesterton,” said Michelle Rapkin, marketing consultant for Hendrickson. “People are going back a step, having been newly re-introduced to some of Lewis’s and Tolkien’s fiction, [and they are reading Chesterton] who really laid the groundwork.”
Chesterton’s biography makes him an intriguing figure for Christian readers, publishers say. In young adulthood, he experimented with Ouija boards and spiritualism before migrating to orthodox Christianity. He converted at age 48 from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. His passionate, personal faith and his years as a Catholic help him appeal to both evangelical and Catholic readers, according to Joel Miller, acquisitions editor at Thomas Nelson.
G. Jeffrey MacDonald is an independent journalist and author of Thieves in the Temple: The Christian Church and the Selling of the American Soul (Basic Books, 2010).
