Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London in 1874. He was educated at St. Paul's School and Slade Art School. Chesterton lost interest in art and instead began writing articles for newspapers and journals such as The Daily News, The Speaker, The Bookman and the Illustrated London News.

Chesterton's first two books were collections of poetry, The Wild Knight (1900) and Greybeards at Play (1900). This was followed by biographies of Robert Browning (1903), Charles Dickens (1906) and R. L. Stevenson (1907) and the popular novel, The Innocence of Father Brown (1911).

On the outbreak of the First World War, Chesterton was recruited by Charles Masterman, the head of Britain's War Propaganda Bureau (WPB), to help shape public opinion. His work included the writing of two pamphlets, The Barbarism in Berlin (1915) and The Crimes of England (1915) and numerous articles in Britain's newspapers.

In 1922 Chesterton became a Roman Catholic. This influenced the subject matter of his work and he published biographies of St. Francis of Assisi and St Thomas Aquinas. G. K. Chesterton's Collected Poems appeared in 1933 and his Autobiography, just after his death in 1936.