Description: Published in 1912, shortly after The Ball and the Cross (now in its third Dover printing), Manalive celebrates one of Chesterton's earliest themes: the joy of being alive. That principle is embodied in one Innocent Smith, who is taken up by a fierce wind one day and dropped on the lawn of a boardinghouse inhabited by a group of disillusioned young people. His arrival has a rejuvenating effect on this dull group. In the course of the book, Smith courts and remarries his wife repeatedly, lives in various houses, which all turn out to be his own, and attempts murder, but only succeeds in firing life into his victims. Perhaps the most light-hearted of all Chesterton's "serious" books, Manalive is full of high-spirited nonsense expressing important ideas: life is worth living, one can break conventions while keeping the commandments, and civilization has entangled man into thinking certain things wrong that are not wrong at all.

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