About the Author
English-born American writerChristopher William Bradshaw Isherwoodportrayed Berlin in the early 1930s in his best known works, such asGoodbye to Berlin(1939), the basis for the musicalCabaret(1966). Isherwood was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist.WithW.H. Audenhe wrote three plays—The Dog Beneath the Skin(1932),The Ascent of F6(1936), andOn the Frontier(1938). Isherwood tells the story in his first autobiography,Lions and Shadows.After Isherwood wrote joke answers on his second-year exams, Cambridge University in 1925 asked him to leave. He briefly attended medical school and progressed with his first two novels,All the Conspirators(1928) andThe Memorial(1932). In 1930, he moved to Berlin, where he taught English, dabbled in Communism, and enthusiastically explored his homosexuality. His experiences provided the material forMister Norris Changes Trains(1935) andGoodbye to Berlin(1938), still his most famous book.In Berlin in 1932, he also began an important relationship withHeinz Neddermeyer, a young German with whom he fled the Nazis in 1933. England refused entry to Neddermeyer on his second visit in 1934, and the pair moved restlessly about Europe until the Gestapo arrested Neddermeyer in May 1937 and then finally separated them.In 1938, Isherwood sailed with Auden to China to writeJourney to a War(1939), about the Sino-Japanese conflict. They returned to England and Isherwood went on to Hollywood to look for movie-writing work. He also 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 publishedPrater 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 novelDown 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 masterpieceA 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. InKathleen and Frank(1971), he drew on the letters and diaries of his parents. InChristopher 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.
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