G. K. Chesterton was a legend in London literary circles even during his lifetime. George Bernard Shaw called him "a man of colossal genius," and as a young man Chesterton was hailed as Fleet Street's reincarnation of Samuel Johnson. Actually he shared some of the protean virtuosity of both Shaw and Johnson. Chesterton was the son of a middle-class London family. He had studied art and literature at the Slade School and attended lectures on English literature at University College from 1892 to 1895. He was an established poet, novelist, critic, essayist, biographer, short-story writer, and journalist before he made his debut as a playwright. Of the more than eighty books he wrote one was George Bernard Shaw ("the best work of literary art I have yet provoked," commented Shaw) and another was the play The Judgment of Dr. Johnson ("two great minds amalgamated in dramatic form," declared critic J...