The Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park will explore how newspaper work shaped two literary giants in a fall lecture pairing Ernest Hemingway with an unlikely companion: English writer G.K. Chesterton.

Dale Ahlquist, president and co-founder of the American Chesterton Society, will deliver the talk, titled "Hemingway and Chesterton: From Journalism to Art," on the evening of Tuesday, Sept. 29, at the Hemingway Birthplace Museum, 339 N. Oak Park Ave. The foundation's website will carry the exact start time and ticket details.

The lecture's premise draws on a connection Hemingway himself acknowledged. In his short story "The Three Day Blow," a character named Bill raises a glass and says, "Now let's drink to Chesterton." Redd Griffin, who co-founded the Hemingway Foundation in 1983 and died in 2012, explored that literary kinship in a 2005 essay the foundation has republished to preview the event.

The pairing is not arbitrary.

"Hemingway stressed life as it was; Chesterton, as it ought to be," Griffin wrote in that essay. "In the authors' words readers could discover the awareness common to all people."

Griffin argued that both writers built their art on their journalism, relying on vivid images and universal human experience to move from newsroom deadlines to lasting literature. The foundation described him as "Oak Park's greatest champion of Ernest Hemingway." Beyond co-founding the foundation, Griffin worked at the Chicago City News Bureau and WTTW, co-founded the Historical Society of Oak Park-River Forest in 1968 and served as an Oak Park Township trustee and state representative.

Ahlquist brings decades of Chesterton scholarship to the lectern. He founded the American Chesterton Society in 1996, publishes its magazine Gilbert and hosts the EWTN television series "The Apostle of Common Sense." He also co-founded Chesterton Academy, a Catholic high school in Hopkins, Minnesota.

The Sept. 29 lecture adds to a fall lineup that includes "In Ernie's Footsteps" walking tours of young Hemingway's Oak Park on Sunday, Aug. 30 and Sunday, Sept. 27, led by Dr. Nancy Sindelar, author of "Influencing Hemingway: The People and Places That Shaped His Life and Work." Those tours are capped at 15 participants and require advance reservations.

As we reported July 23, the foundation is also enrolling Oak Park students in youth fiction writing workshops this fall.

Registration details for the Sept. 29 program are available at hemingwaybirthplace.com.