d), 1904–86, British-American author. After the appearance of his first novel, All the Conspirators (1928), Isherwood went to Germany. The four years he spent there furnished him with the material for what are probably his best novels, The Last of Mr. Norris (1935) and Goodby to Berlin (1939; reissued as The Berlin Stories, 1946); these books formed the basis for John Van Druten's play, I Am a Camera (1951), and for the Broadway musical Cabaret (1966). The Berlin novels, which report on the period of social and political unrest during the Nazi rise to power, illustrate Isherwood's general concern with the problem of the intellectual in a tyrannical society.
A close friend of W. H. Auden Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh Auden) (ô`dən), 1907–73, Anglo-American poet, b. York, England, educated at Oxford.
..... Click the link for more information. , Isherwood collaborated with him on the dramas The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938), as well as on Journey to a War (1939), a book on China. Isherwood emigrated (1939) to the United States, becoming a citizen (1946). During the 1940s his interests turned to Hinduism; see his Essentials of Vedanta (1969). Among his later works are Prater Violet (1945), The World in the Evening (1954), Down There on a Visit (1962), A Single Man (1964), and Meeting by the River (1967) and a study of his parents, Kathleen and Frank (1971). Isherwood was an early advocate of discarding the taboos against homosexuality, a subject discussed in his memoir, Christopher and His Kind (1972).
Bibliography
See K. Bucknell, ed., Diaries: 1939–1960 (1997) and Lost Years: A Memoir, 1945–1951 (2000); J. J. Berg and C. Freeman, ed., Conversations with Christopher Isherwood (2001); biography by P. Parker (2004); studies by C. G. Heilbrun (1970), P. Piazza (1978), S. Wade (1991), and K. Ferres (1994).
Isherwood, Christopher
orig. Christopher William Bradshaw(born Aug. 26, 1904, High Lane, Cheshire, Eng.—died Jan. 4, 1986, Santa Monica, Calif., U.S.) British-born U.S. writer. Educated at Cambridge University, he became close friends with W.H. Auden, with whom he traveled and collaborated on three verse dramas, including The Ascent of F6 (1936). He lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933; his two novels about this period, later published together as The Berlin Stories (1946), inspired the play I Am a Camera (1951; film, 1955) and the musical Cabaret (1966; film, 1972). A pacifist, he moved to southern California at the beginning of World War II, where he taught and wrote screenplays. His later fiction and memoirs reflect his homosexuality. A follower of Swami Prabhavananda, he wrote and translated works on Indian Vedanta.
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