About Christopher Isherwood
Christopher Isherwood was a British-American novelist whose career spanned from the late 1920s into the 1980s. He was born in 1904 into a family still deeply influenced by the mores of Edwardian England. Christopher, as the eldest son, was expected to achieve great things, but almost from the start his mode was to counter those expectations and seek a world beyond England.
In 1929, he traveled to Berlin with the poet W. H. Auden, whom he had met during his studies at Cambridge University. It was a transformative trip for the young writer. His fiction about Berlin in the 1930s in turn came to shape later generations’ understanding of that city and of a period in which vibrant free expression of every sort met the increasingly harsh hand of rising Nazi power. Isherwood’s Berlin Stories were made into a play, I am a Camera, and into the hit 1972 movie, Cabaret, directed by Bob Fosse and for which Liza Minnelli won an Academy Award. In Berlin Stories the writer Christopher Isherwood is a character, attended to by a housekeeper who calls him “Herr Issyvoo,” In the movie, British actor Michael York plays a character similar to Isherwood.
A pacifist, Isherwood moved to the United States with Auden in 1939, a move for which they both were widely criticized in England. Isherwood stayed for a time in New York but soon moved to Hollywood and began working as a screen writer and later also as a teacher. He became a citizen of the United States in 1946. In California, he became interested in Indian Vedanta, a philosophical tradition concerned with self-realization and the nature of reality. In 1953, Isherwood met Dan Bachardy, a painter and portraitist who became his partner until Isherwood’s death in 1986. Isherwood was an increasingly vocal and visible activist on behalf of gay rights.
Isherwood’s “American” novels, in addition to A Single Man, include Prater Violet, which Stanley Kauffmann called “one of the best short novels in English written in this century,” A Meeting by the River, and The World in the Evening. Isherwood also published works of memoir, including Christopher and His Kind, Kathleen and Christopher, about his relationship with his mother, and My Guru and His Disciple.
