SOURCE: "The Man Who Was Thursday (1975)," in A Half Century of Views, edited by D. J. Conlon, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987, pp. 335-42.

In the following essay, which was originally published as an introduction to The Man Who Was Thursday, Wills discusses Chesterton's use of symbolism in the novel.

Chesterton restrained himself from being Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka, but something in the makeup of his personality leaned toward the nightmarish, something secret, and blind and central.

Borges, Other Inquisitions

This 1908 novel [The Man Who Was Thursday] has long enjoyed a kind of underground cult among those with a special interest in fantasy. It is the story of a conspiratorial council of seven anarchists, each one named for a day of the week, with the mysterious Sunday as their president. Admirers of the tale have included J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, Jorge...