Book description
Christopher Isherwood settled in California in 1939 and spent the war
years writing for Hollywood, but by 1945 he had all but ceased to write
fiction and even abandoned his habit of keeping a diary. Instead he
embarked on a life of frantic socialising and drinking. Looking back
from the 1970s, Isherwood recreated these years from personal memories
to form a remarkably honest mixture of private and social history.
Christopher Isherwood was born at High lane, Cheshire, in 1904. He
left Cambridge without graduationg, tried briefly to study medicine
and in 1928 published All the Conspirators, followed by a
second novel, The Memorial in 1932. From 1928 onwards he lived
mostly out of England: four years in Berlin, five in various European
countries including Portugal, Holland, Belgium and Denmark. In 1939 he
went to California, which became his home for the rest of his life.
His Berlin experiences produced two novels, Mr Norris Changes
Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939).
Isherwood worked with the American Friends Service Committee during
part of the war. In 1946 he became a US citizen. Following his move to
America he wrote five novels - Prater Violet, The World in
the Evening, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man
and A Meeting by the River; a travel book about South America,
The Condor and the Cows; and Ramakrishna and his
Disciples, a biography of the great Indian mystic.
In 1971 he published Kathleen and Frank, a book based on the
correspondence of his parents and his mother's diary, in 1977
Christopher and his Kind, an autobiographical account of the
years 1929 to 1939, and in 1980 My Guru and His Disciple, the
story of his friendship with the Swami Prabhavananda. He died in 1986.
