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...

""Prater Violet" is the most charming novel I have read in a long time." Diana Trilling
Originally published in 1945, Christopher Isherwood's "Prater Violet" is a stingingly satirical novel about the film industry. It centers around the production of the vacuous fictional melodrama "Prater Violet," set in nineteenth-century Vienna, providing an ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. The novel features vivid portraits of the imperious, passionate, and witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter...

Kathleen and Frank is a love story set in the glory days of the British Empire, the last decades before World War I

It is the story of Christopher Isherwood's parents, the winsome and lively daughter of a successful wine merchant and the reticent, artistically gifted soldier-son of a country squire. They met in 1895 outside a music rehearsal in an army camp and married in 1903 after Christopher's father returned from the Boer War. Frank was killed in an assault near Ypres in 1915; Kathleen remained a widow for the rest of her life.

Their story is told through...

Lions and Shadows blends autobiography and fiction to describe the true education of a writer evolving from precocious schoolboy to dropoutatlarge in London's bohemia of the 1920s. Forced to withdraw from Cambridge University, "Christopher Isherwood" works as a tutor to the privileged, serves as the secretary to a busy string quartet, ill-fatedly attends medical school. Licensed by names he invents, he works up extravagant portraits of his brilliant contemporaries W. H. Auden, Edward Upward, and Stephen Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion changed the literary...