G. K. Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in Kensington, London, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and University College London and became one of the most prolific journalists and essayists of Edwardian England. He wrote the Father Brown detective stories, the novels The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday, and works of Christian apologetics such as Orthodoxy (1908). Baptized in the Church of England, he entered full communion with the Catholic Church in 1922. With his friend Hilaire Belloc he developed distributism, and in 1926 he helped found the Distributist League, promoted through his paper G.K.'s Weekly.

Chesterton influenced writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and C. S. Lewis, who credited The Everlasting Man with aiding his conversion, and a 1909 column of his made a strong impression on Mohandas Gandhi. Catholic social thinkers, localists and some conservatives continue to cite distributism, and he is admired by both liberal and conservative Christians. Critics have argued that distributism was never practicable at national scale, and the Distributist League, whose membership peaked at about 2,000 in 1928, broke apart in the 1940s. Scholars and critics have also documented antisemitic stereotypes in his writing, which some defenders have sought to place in the context of his era.