The Return of Don Quixote
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The Return of Don Quixote is a novel by G. K. Chesterton. Published in 1927 by Chatto & Windus in London and by Dodd, Mead & Co. in New York, it was his final novel.
By 1963, when it was reprinted by Darwen Finlayson, it was considered one of his lesser-known works.[1]
Chesterton began working on the novel prior to World War I, and returned to it sporadically over the years. In the 1920s, he began working on it again, when the turmoil following the war made literature more conducive to criticizing social institutions. Initially serialized in G. K.'s Weekly in 1925, the novel was ill-suited to the medium and was phased out of serialization, to be fully published in 1927.[2][3]
In 1912, Chesterton published an essay in The New York Times also entitled "The Return of Don Quixote." In it, he mused about a latter-day returning of the character, placed into modern society: "I want to ask whether, if Don Quixote returned today with the same wild ways of knight errantry, it would not rather be the knight errant that was sensible and the world all around him that was crazy."[4]
Plot
Librarian Michael Hearne participates in an amateur reenactment play and develops a Don Quixote-like attitude, which gradually foments social revolution and a return to medievalism.