Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

A stunningly intimate exploration of the writer and gay cultural icon and of his lifelong search for authenticity.

The story of Christopher Isherwood’s life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born an heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait.

Isherwood began his career depicting the psychological wreckage of World War I. Living in Berlin, his stories and plays (cowritten with W. H. Auden), inspired by the city’s nightlife and artistic underbelly, made him famous. With the rise of fascism and the Gestapo’s arrest of his boyfriend, Isherwood left the country and found work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where he became the disciple of a Hindu monk, Swami Prabhavananda. Together they translated the Bhagavad Gita.

Isherwood shed his family ghosts and became a chief instigator of the cultural shift that made gay liberation possible. Every step of the journey served his writing; one of our greatest diarists, he recorded his experiences and transformed them in fiction and memoir. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless, penetrating, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations for self-understanding and happiness. Here is Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.