Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine, I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a file full of Chesterton ancedotes. They were idiosyncratic, historical, and Chestertonian. He gave me permission to use them here. I hope y'all find them as interesting as I have over the years. Most of them have never been published.
Chesterton Short(s)
In the autumn of 1917, young F. Scott Fitzgerald decided that a Great Writer is born every ten years. He noted that Shaw was 61, Wells was 51, Chesterton was 41, biographer Shane Leslie was 31 and he, F. Scott, was 21. His one demur was that he could not think of a better example for age 31. [Letters, New York: Scribner's, 1963]
