Cloaked all the while beneath his familiar and memorable public persona, G.K. Chesterton had a private life of extraordinary emotional, mental, physical, psychological and spiritual intensity and complexity. He ate, drank and worked too much. Late in 1914, in fact, he very nearly died after a complete physical and mental collapse. It seems almost incredible now that he succeeded even half as well as he did, not only in the playing of the larger-than-life character he filled out for himself in public but in his truly prodigious output as a writer - for which, despite all fashions, he justly remains a phenomenon of literature.
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