Isherwood, Christopher William Bradshaw

Isherwood, Christopher William Bradshaw (1904-1986), Anglo-American writer, born in Disley, Cheshire, and educated at the University of Cambridge. He made the acquaintance of W. H. Auden at preparatory school and later travelled to China with him in 1938. His first novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932) show the influence of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf on his work. His experience as a tutor in Berlin (1928-1933) provided background for Goodbye to Berlin (1939; reissued as The Berlin Stories, 1946). This collection of tales, set against the growing power of Nazism, was adapted as I Am a Camera, a play by John van Druten (1951) and a film (1955), and as Cabaret, a theatre (1966) and film (1972) musical. In collaboration with Auden, Isherwood wrote three experimental plays: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). His semiautobiographical novel, Lions and Shadows, in which his friends Auden and Spender, among others appear under fictitious names, was published in 1938, and Kathleen and Frank, his joint biography of his parents, in 1972. Isherwood settled in the United States in 1939. His subsequent novels—such as Prater Violet (1945), Down There on a Visit (1962), and A Meeting by the River (1967)—are concerned with the experience of sensitive individuals in incongruous settings and circumstances. The Essentials of the Vedanta (1969) expresses his deep interest in Hindu philosophy. With Christopher and His Kind (1976), a witty and utterly frank account of his life from 1929 to 1939, Isherwood revealed his homosexuality and its overriding importance in his work.