G. K. Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a London journalist who seemed to write everything at once: essays, literary criticism, lives of Dickens and St Francis, the comic nightmare The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), the Father Brown detective stories, and the defence of Christian belief he called Orthodoxy (1908).

His first books, in 1900, were verse. The Wild Knight and Other Poems contains "A Christmas Carol," a small carol of the Christ-child on Mary's lap; later came The Ballad of the White Horse (1911) and "Lepanto" (1911). Christmas stayed one of his favourite subjects, in poems and in essays.

He became a Roman Catholic in 1922 and died at his home in Beaconsfield in 1936.