Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood (born in Disley, Cheshire, 1904; died in Santa Monica, 1986) was a British-born novelist and playwright who became an American citizen in 1946. He wrote in English during the first half of the twentieth century, and his name is linked both to interwar Berlin and to the circle of young writers gathered around W. H. Auden. Today he is remembered chiefly for his Berlin fiction and as one of the early English-language writers to deal openly with homosexual life.

He came from a family of soldiers and comfortably off middle-class people. His father died in the First World War, after which the family settled in London. Isherwood was schooled at St Edmund's and then at Repton, where he befriended Edward Upward. He went on to Cambridge but left in 1925 without a degree. Around that time he renewed his acquaintance with Auden, and together with Stephen Spender he became part of a group of poets and novelists that critics of the 1930s placed at the heart of English writing. That milieu shaped his first steps as an author, including a juvenile first novel and several plays written with Auden.

In 1929 he went to Berlin, drawn by the sexual freedom of the Weimar Republic, as he later admitted. He worked as a tutor, met Gerald Hamilton and the young Englishwoman Jean Ross, and kept a diary that supplied material for his novels. His portrait of the city on the eve of the Nazi rise took shape in Goodbye to Berlin (1939), whose character Sally Bowles fed the play I Am a Camera and eventually the musical Cabaret. He left Germany in 1933 with Heinz Neddermeyer, spent time in several European countries, and settled in the United States in 1939.

In California he grew interested in Indian philosophy through Gerald Heard and the swami Prabhavananda, and for years he worked with the Vedanta Society of Southern California. From 1947 he lived with the photographer William Caskey, with whom he travelled in South America. In 1952 he met Don Bachardy, then eighteen, on a Santa Monica beach, and the two remained together until Isherwood's death.

His output moves between fiction, drama and autobiography. A Single Man (1964), which follows a professor through a single day of grief after the death of his partner, is often regarded as his finest novel. His memoir Christopher and His Kind (1976), which speaks frankly about his homosexuality, made him a touchstone for gay readers. His lasting value lies in a precise, wry and unsentimental eye for his characters and for the Berlin of his day.