Set in the aftermath of World War I, Christopher Isherwood's The Memorial is the witty, almost forensic portrayal of the dissolution of a tradition-bound English family. On the cusp of adulthood, the Cambridge student Eric Vernon finds himself torn between his desire to emulate his heroic father, who led a life of quiet sacrifice before dying in the war, and his envy of his father's roguish friend who survived the war and afterward threw himself into gay life.

Published in 1932, when Isherwood was twenty-eight years old, The Memorial is the novel in which a...

Welcome to sunny suburban 1960s Southern California. George is a gay middle-aged English professor, adjusting to solitude after the tragic death of his young partner. He is determined to persist in the routines of his former life. A Single Man follows him over the course of an ordinary twenty-four hours. Behind his British reserve, tides of grief, rage, and loneliness surge--but what is revealed is a man who loves being alive despite all the everyday injustices.

When Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man first appeared, it shocked many with its frank, sympathetic, and...

Bremen, 1928. The Greek Islands, 1932. London, 1938. California, 1940. Four portraits, four settings, four narrators all named Christopher Isherwood. Here are the postcards home from a spiritual tourist looking for a new mode of life as well as a new place to live while Europe, and then the world, moves relentlessly toward war. Which of the guides he encounters can lead him to a better future? The businessman, the utopian, the guru, the geisha?

Published in 1962, Down There on a Visit is based on material from a proposed epic that would also have incorporated The Berlin...

A deeply introspective book about war, religion, and sexuality

Against the backdrop of World War II, The World in the Evening charts the emotional development of Stephen Monk, an aimless Englishman living in California. After his second marriage suddenly ends, Stephen finds himself living with a relative in a small Pennsylvania Quaker town, haunted by memories of his prewar affair with a younger man during a visit to the Canary Islands. The world traveler comes to a gradual understanding of himself and of his newly adopted homeland.
When first published in 1953,...

Candid and revealing, the final volume of Christopher Isherwood's diaries brings together his thoughts on life, love, and death. Beginning in the period of his life when he wrote Kathleen and Frank, his first intensely personal book, Liberation: Diaries 1970-1983 intimately and wittily records Isherwood's immersion in the 1970s art scene in Los Angeles, New York, and London--a world peopled by the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and David Hockney, as well as his Broadway writing career, which brought him in touch with John Huston, Merchant and Ivory,...

An indispensable memoir by one of the most prominent writers of his generation
Originally published in 1976, "Christopher and His Kind" covers the most memorable ten years in the writer's life from 1928, when Christopher Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. His friends and colleagues during this time included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E. M. Forster, as well as colorful figures he met in Germany and later fictionalized in his two Berlin novels and who appeared again, fictionalized to an even...