Carlyle, Stevenson y Tolstói

Chesterton, the great English writer, is best known for Father Brown's crime stories and for his novels, especially The Man Who Was Thursday. But Chesterton was also a magnificent biographer in a time of magnificent biographers: Stefan Zweig, Lytton Strachey, André Maurois, Emil Ludwig or Harold Lamb, to remember only a few representative names. Chesterton, as a biographer was always at the level of the best and was perhaps the first in time, since he began to write biographies at the end of the 19th century, at the beginning of his literary career, before the genre became fashionable, and his first important and successful book is the biography dedicated to the poet Robert Browning (1903). What brought Chesterton to the biographical genre was, most likely, his human generosity, his great capacity for enthusiasm and his taste for controversy. Chesterton's biographies are not excessively objective, nor are they conventional or academic, nor do they stand out for their size, their erudition or their critical or documentary apparatus, but they are always exciting and enlightening; They are written with passion and enormous vigor and intelligence and they touch on a thousand issues apart from the main character, thus illuminating, in a somewhat oblique way, the humanity of the character but also his time, equally protagonist.