Christopher Isherwood

Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was a renowned British author, known for his works that depicted Berlin in the early 1930s. His best-known works, such as "Goodbye to Berlin," served as the inspiration for the musical "Cabaret," which won an Academy Award. Isherwood was a versatile writer, who excelled in various genres including novel-writing, playwriting, screenwriting, autobiography, and diarism.

Born in England, Isherwood began his writing career early in his life. After writing joke answers on his second-year exams, Cambridge University asked him to leave. He then briefly attended medical school and progressed with his first two novels, "All the Conspirators" and "The Memorial." In 1930, Isherwood moved to Berlin, where he taught English, dabbled in Communism, and explored his homosexuality. His experiences in Berlin provided the material for his famous books, "Mister Norris Changes Trains" and "Goodbye to Berlin." In 1933, he fled Berlin with Heinz Neddermeyer, a young German, and moved restlessly about Europe until the Gestapo arrested Neddermeyer in May 1937, separating them.

Isherwood then sailed to China to write "Journey to a War" with W.H. Auden, before moving to Hollywood to look for movie-writing work. He became a disciple of the Ramakrishna monk, Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. He decided not to take monastic vows, but he remained a Hindu for the rest of his life, serving, praying, and lecturing in the temple every week and writing a biography, "Ramakrishna and His Disciples" (1965).

In 1945, Isherwood published "Prater Violet," fictionalizing his first movie writing job in London in 1933-1934. In Hollywood, he spent the start of the 1950s fighting his way free of a destructive five-year affair with an attractive and undisciplined American photographer, William Caskey. Caskey took the photographs for Isherwood’s travel book about South America, "The Condor and The Cows" (1947). Isherwood’s sixth novel, "The World in the Evening" (1954), written mostly during this period, was less successful than earlier ones.

In 1953, he fell in love with Don Bachardy, an eighteen-year-old college student born and raised in Los Angeles. They were to remain together until Isherwood’s death. In 1961, Isherwood and completed the final revisions to his new novel "Down There on a Visit" (1962). Their relationship nearly ended in 1963, and Isherwood moved out of their Santa Monica house. This dark period underpins Isherwood’s masterpiece "A Single Man" (1964). Isherwood wrote another novel, "A Meeting by the River" (1967), about two brothers, but he gave up writing fiction and turned entirely to autobiography. In "Kathleen and Frank" (1971), he drew on the letters and diaries of his parents. In "Christopher and His Kind" (1976), he returned to the 1930s to tell, as a publicly avowed homosexual, the real story of his life in Berlin and his wanderings with Heinz Neddermeyer. The book made him a hero of gay liberation and a national celebrity all over again but now in his true, political and personal identity.