Hilaire bellco biography channels

Hilaire Belloc (born July 27, , La Celle-Saint-Cloud, Fr.—died July 16, , Guildford, Surrey, Eng.) was a French-born poet, historian, and essayist who was among the .

He was one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. He was a fierce proponent of Roman Catholicism , the "faith of Europe. His mother Elizabeth Rayner Parkes was also a writer, and a great-granddaughter of the English chemist Joseph Priestley. She married attorney Louis Belloc in In , five years after they wed, Louis died, but not before he was wiped out financially in a stock market crash.

The young widow brought her son Hilaire, along with his sister, Marie, back to England where he remained, except for his voluntary enlistment as a young man in the French artillery. He was educated at John Henry Cardinal Newman's Oratory School and later served his term of military service, as a French citizen, with an artillery regiment near Toul in He was powerfully built, with great stamina, and walked extensively in Britain and Europe.

While courting his future wife Elodie, whom he first met in , the impecunious Belloc walked a good part of the way from the midwest of the United States to her home in northern California, paying for lodging at remote farm houses and ranches by sketching the owners and reciting poetry. He was the brother of the novelist Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes.

In , he married Elodie Hogan, an American.

Belloc was born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France (next to Versailles and near Paris) to a French father and English mother, and grew up in England.

They had five children before her death from influenza. His son Louis was killed in World War I. He suffered a stroke in , and never recovered from its effects. He lived quietly at home in Guildford, England , until his death on July 16, A graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, Belloc was a noted figure within the University, having served as President of the Oxford Union, the undergraduate debating society.

He later became a naturalized British citizen and went into politics.