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Best known for his Father Brown detective stories, and most admired as a thinker for his full-length books, of which he wrote almost fifty, G. K. Chesterton is numbered among the great essayists of the English language. His essays so far collected total almost forty volumes, and although most of them were newspaper or magazine articles, they have established Chesterton in the tradition of the fine art of the essay, which runs from Francis Bacon through Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Robert Louis Stevenson, Augustine Birrell, E. V. Lucas, Max Beerbohm, Robert Lynd, and H. L. Mencken. Most anthologies of the essay contain samples of his work, and as Ifor Evans puts it in his A Short History of English Literature (1940), Chesterton is regarded as "outstanding in the essay's final phase."
Evans's use of the term "final phase" indicates the notion of a change (related to the sort of decline summed up in the title of John Gross's book, The Rise and Decline of the Man of Letters, 1969) away from belles lettres, and a splendid versatility by which literary journalists were also poets, essayists, critics, debaters, and participants in the great conversation that spans the centuries.
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