Christopher Isherwood Books In Order

Goodbye to Berlin

Published to coincide with the revival of Cabaret, now opening on Broadway, Goodbye to Berlin is the original story of the chanteuse hero*ine Sally Bowles. Isherwood ironically captures life in Weimar Berlin, a city infamous for its flourishing demimonde and violent politics. 2 cassettes.

All the Conspirators

In this novel that clearly shows his early influences, Christopher Isherwood explores the theme of the destruction of the son by the evil mother. Set in the Kensington of the 1920s, Philip and Joan fight to expunge their mother’s oppressiveness.

Prater Violet

Fiction The classic novel on the golden era of film, now back in print! Originally published in 1945, 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 ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. The novel features the vivid portraits of imperious, passionate, and witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood. ‘Prater Violet, in my view, is one of the best short novels in English written in this century.’ Stanley Kauffmann ‘Prater Violet is the most charming novel I have read in a long time…
. a novel about movie writers, which is yet a novel about the life of every serious artist.’ Diana Trilling ‘A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles the episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence.’ Edmund Wilson A major figure in both twentieth century fiction and the gay rights movement, Christopher Isherwood 1904 1986 is also the author of Down There on a Visit, Lions and Shadows, The Memorial, The World in the Evening, and A Meeting by the River, all available in paperback editions from the University of Minnesota Press.

Down There on a Visit

Christopher Isherwood originally intended Down There on a Visit to be part of The Lost, the unfinished epic novel that would also incorporate his famous Berlin Stories. Tracing many of the same themes as that earlier work, this novel is a bemused, sometimes acid portrait of people caught in private sexual hells of their own making. Its four episodes are connected by four narrators. All are called ‘Christopher Isherwood, ‘ but each is a different character inhabiting a new setting: Berlin in 1928, the Greek Isles in 1933, London in 1938, and California in 1940. Down There on a Visit is a major work that shows Isherwood at the height of his literary powers.

A Single Man

Fiction The author’s favorite of his own novels, now back in print! When A Single Man was originally published, it shocked many by its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in midlife. George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, and determines to persist in the routines of his daily life; the course of A Single Man spans twenty four hours in an ordinary day. An Englishman and a professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way, and his internal reflections and interactions with others reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness. Wry, suddenly manic, constantly funny, surprisingly sad, this novel catches the texture of life itself. ‘A testimony to Isherwood’s undiminished brilliance as a novelist.’ Anthony Burgess ‘An absolutely devastating, unnerving, brilliant book.’ Stephen Spender ‘Just as his Prater Violet is the best novel I know about the movies, Isherwood’s A Single Man, published in 1964, is one of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement.’ Edmund White

My Guru And His Disciple

‘My Guru And His Disciple is a sweetly modest and honest portrait of Isherwood’s spiritual instructor, Swami Prabhavananda, the Hindu priest who guided Isherwood for some thirty years. It is also a book about the often amusing and sometimes painful counterpoint between worldliness and holiness in Isherwood’s own life. Sexual sprees, all night drinking bouts, a fast car ride with Greta Garbo, script writing conferences at M G M, and intellectual sparring sessions with Bertolt Brecht alternated with nights of fasting at the Vedanta Center and a six month period of celibacy and sobriety. Seldom has a single man been endowed with such strong drives toward both sensuality and spirituality, abandon and discipline…
. In these pages, Isherwood has reinvented the spirit of devotion for the modern reader.’ Edmund White, New York Times Book Review ‘This book is a humbling tribute to someone who revealed to Isherwood inner grounds for spiritual awareness.’ Alan Hollinghurst, New Statesman A major figure in twentieth century fiction and the gay rights movement, Christopher Isherwood 1904 1986 is the author of Down There on a Visit, Lions and Shadows, A Meeting by the River, The Memorial, Prater Violet, A Single Man, and The World in the Evening, all available from the University of Minnesota Press.

Jacob’s Hands (With: Aldous Huxley)

Originally written in the late 1930s and recently discovered, this short novel presents a saga of the paranormal, love, money, and redemption, set against the colourful backdrop of California in the 1920s.

People One Ought to Know

A collection of eighteen illustrated poems about a variety of animals with some particularly human characteristics.

Where Joy Resides

Best known for The Berlin Stories the inspiration for the Tony and Academy Award winning musical Cabaret Christopher Isherwood 1904 1986 was a major figure in twentieth century fiction and the gay rights movement. This collection presents two complete novels, Prater Violet 1945 and A Single Man 1964; episodes from three other novels, Goodbye to Berlin 1939, Down There on a Visit 1962, and Lions and Shadows 1938; and excerpts from his nonfiction works, Exhumations 1966, Kathleen and Frank 1971, and My Guru and His Disciple 1980. ‘The late Christopher Isherwood was a writer with exceptional powers of observation…
. An excellent anthology.’ Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood 1904 1986 is also the author of A Single Man, Down There on a Visit, Lions and Shadows, The Memorial, The World in the Evening, and A Meeting by the River, all available in paperback editions from the University of Minnesota Press. Don Bachardy, Isherwood’s longtime partner, is a painter and writer living in Santa Monica, California. His books include Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood 1991 and Stars in My Eyes 2000. James P. White is a novelist who directs the creative writing program at the University of South Alabama.

The Mortmere Stories

Although legendary in literary and academic circles, these sometimes gothic, sometimes grotesque, and often hilarious stories are published here for the first time. Christopher Isherwood and his old school friend, Edward Upward, were Cambridge undergraduates in the early 1920s when they engaged in a literary attack on the dons and the ”poshocracy” the fashionable and wealthy students. The stories are important milestones, offering a glimpse of the initial literary styles of two authors who later became famous the meticulous, experimental, intellectually rigorous Upward, and the prodigiously talented Isherwood creating an extraordinary world in an engaging manner. ”A bit of wickedly funny ephemera.” A Different Light Newsletter.

The Memorial

With The Memorial, Christopher Isherwood began his lifelong work of rewriting his own experiences into witty yet almost forensic portraits of modern society. Set in the aftermath of World War I, The Memorial portrays the dissolution of a tradition bound English family. 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 for his father’s great friend Edward Blake, who survived the war only to throw himself into gay life in Berlin and the pursuit of meaningless relationships.

The Condor And The Cows

In September 1947, long before mass tourism and with no knowledge of Spanish, Christopher Isherwood and his lover Bill Caskey left for a six month tour of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. Isherwood’s account of this journey, The Condor And The Cows, is one of very few classic travel books on South America and was among the books Isherwood considered his best. Based on his trip journal and loosely structured by the vagaries of his travels, these pages give us an Isherwood who dreams of voluntary exile in the tropical paradise of Cura ao and dines out on stories of Na*zis in Berlin, missionaries in China, and movie stars in Hollywood. He describes the surprising and sometimes unnerving people and places he encounters through telling, cinematic details of Inca drinking vessels, the Spanish colonial city of Cuzco which he calls ‘one of the most beautiful monuments to bigotry and sheer brutal stupidity in the whole world’, a bullfight in Bogot , the towering ruins of Machu Picchu. Unsentimental, rich, and wonderfully rendered, this expanded edition includes additional photographs by Bill Caskey and a new foreword by Jeffrey Meyers.

Ramakrishna and His Disciples

A biography of Ramakrishna, who spent most of his adult life meditating and teaching in a temple on the banks of the Ganges near Calcutta. During his lifetime he was known to relatively few people but his disciples carried his message to the United States and Europe at the turn of the century.

Christopher and His Kind

Christopher and His Kind is an intriguing slice of autobiography. It covers ten years in the writer’s life from 1929, when Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to the beginning of 1939, when he arrived in New York to start a life in the States. The book revealingly contrasts fact with fiction the real people Isherwood met in Germany with the portraits of them in his two Berlin novels, who then appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret. But one does not need to be familiar with his body of work to appreciate the powerful and compelling story he tells here. Isherwood left Berlin in 1933, after Hitler came to power. For the next four years, he wandered around Europe through Greece, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France with a German boy named Heinz. The characters in the book include W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E.M. Forster as well as the literary circles of Somerset Maugham and Virginia Woolf. Chronicling German refugees and the British colony in Portugal, the Group Theatre company which performed the three Auden Isherwood plays and the film studio where he worked and which he used as the setting for Prater Violet, Christopher and His Kind is an engrossing and powerfully rendered portrait of a decade in the life of a major writer.

The Wishing Tree

Christopher Isherwood came to the Vedanta Society fed up with religion, in fact, rather angry about the whole experience.

Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

At times pious, at times profane but always unashamedly honest, The Diaries of Christopher Isherwood provide an inside look at the life and times of one of the most celebrated writers of the century. Chronicling Isherwood’s life from 1939, when he emigrated to the United States, until 1960, these entries cover some of the most turbulent years of his career and give readers unprecedented insight into the major turning points in his life. Here, Isherwood relates the spiritual crisis he went through as World War II began, his discipleship along with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard with the Hindu monk Swami Prabhavananda and his decision to become a pacifist. Here also are his accounts of his intense social life in Hollywood, his career as a screenwriter and his many sexual affairs. Readers will be particularly fascinated by his revealing anecdotes and gossip about the literary greats such as W. H. Auden, Thomas Mann, E. M. Forster, and Tennessee Williams and movie stars such as Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Laurence Olivier of the time.

Lost Years

The English writer Christopher Isherwood settled in California in 1939 and spent the war years working in Hollywood film studios, teaching English to European refugees, and converting to Hinduism. By the time the war ended, he realized he was not cut out to be a monk. With his self imposed wartime vigil behind him, he careened into a life of frantic socializing, increasing dissipation, anxiety, and, eventually, despair. For nearly a half decade he all but ceased to write fiction and even abandoned his lifelong habit of keeping a diary. This is Isherwood’s own account, reconstructed from datebooks, letters, and memory nearly thirty years later, of his experience during those missing years: his activities in Santa Monica, and also in New York and London, just after the war. Begun in 1971, in a postsixties atmosphere of liberation, Lost Years includes explicit details of his romantic and sexual relationships during the 1940s and unveils a hidden and sometimes shocking way of life shared with friends and acquaintances many of whom were well known artists, actors, and film makers. Not until the 1951 Broadway success of I Am a Camera, adapted from his Berlin stories, did Isherwood begin to reclaim control of his talents and of his future. Isherwood never prepared Lost Years for publication because he rapidly became caught up in writing the book that established him as a hero of gay liberation, Christopher and His Kind. With unpolished directness, and with insight and wit, Lost Years shows how Isherwood developed his private recollections into the unique mixture of personal mythology and social history that characterizes much of his best work. This surprising and important memoir also highlights his determination to track down even the most elusive and unappealing aspects of his past in order to understand and honestly portray himself, both as a writer and as a human being.

Conversations with Christopher Isherwood

To many readers Christopher Isherwood means Berlin. The author of Goodbye to Berlin 1939, the British Isherwood found fame through the adaptation of that work into the stage play and film I Am a Camera and then into the stage musical and film Cabaret. Throughout his career he was a keen observer, always seemingly in the right place at the right time. Whether in Berlin in the 1930s or in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, Isherwood 1904 86 reflected on his life and his world and wrote perceptive commentary on contemporary European and American history and culture. His ties to California made him more American than British. ‘I have spent half my life in the United States,’ he said. ‘Los Angeles is a great place for feeling at home because everybody’s from someplace else.’ Isherwood can be credited for helping make L.A. an acceptable setting for serious fiction, paving the way for John Rechy, Joan Didion, Paul Monette, and Bernard Cooper, among others. The interviews in this volume two of which have never before been published stretch over a period of forty years. They address a wide range of topics, including the importance of diary keeping to his life and work; the interplay between fiction and autobiography; his turning from Christianity to Hinduism; his circle of friends, including W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, and E. M. Forster; several important places in his life Berlin, England, and California; and his homosexual identity. These interviews are substantive, smart, and insightful, allowing the author to discuss his approach to writing of both fiction and nonfiction. ‘More and more,’ he explains, ‘writing is appearing to me as a kind of self analysis, a finding out of something about myself and about the past and about what life is like, as far as I’m concerned: who I am, who these people are, what it’s all about.’ This emphasis on self discovery comes as no surprise from a writer who mined his own diaries and experiences for inspiration. As an interviewee, Isherwood is introspective, thoughtful, and humorous. James J. Berg is the program director for the Center for Teaching and Learning, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. Chris Freeman is an assistant professor of English at St. John’s University. Berg and Freeman are editors of The Isherwood Century: Essays on the Life and Work of Christopher Isherwood, which was a finalist for the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Studies.

Kathleen and Christopher

Opening a window into the most fascinating and, in many ways, most mysterious period in Christopher Isherwood’s life, Kathleen and Christopher collects more than one hundred previously unpublished letters the young author wrote to his mother between 1935 and 1940. Composed while he was still a struggling writer, they offer a brilliant eyewitness account of Europe on the brink of war and an intimate look at the early career of a major literary figure.

Because Isherwood destroyed his diaries from these years, these letters published for the first time and edited and introduced by Lisa Colletta provide one of the few records of this part of his life not filtered through the lens of time and memory. They contain requests for money and books, descriptions of his travels, stories of his friends W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, reactions to the critical reception of his Berlin Stories, and a tense account of his failed attempt to save his lover Heinz from conscription into the Na*zi military. The final letters in this volume document Isherwood s journey to Los Angeles, where he permanently settled. Also included are thirty images from Isherwood s personal photo album and reproductions of postcards from his international travels.

Warm, confiding, and sometimes quite caustic, the letters also reveal a closer affection between the young Isherwood and his mother than his biographers have portrayed. While Isherwood acknowledged that it took him a long time to come to terms with his mother s influence on his life, the letters in Kathleen and Christopher dispute the prevalent idea that theirs was a relationship rife with conflict. Isherwood s everyday correspondence, written in extraordinary times, reveals a complex yet wholly recognizable and very close bond between mother and son. She was for him, in turns, an agent, a sounding board, and an unbreakable connection to England.

Lisa Colletta is assistant professor of English at Babson College. She is the author of Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel.

Isherwood on Writing

In the 1960s, Christopher Isherwood gave an unprecedented series of lectures at California universities on the theme A Writer and His World. During this time Isherwood, who would liberate the memoir and become the founding father of modern gay writing, spoke openly for the first time about his craft on writing for film, theater, and novels and on spirituality. Isherwood on Writing brings these public addresses together to reveal a distinctly and surprisingly American Isherwood. Given at a critical time in Isherwood’s career, these lectures mark the era when he turned from fiction to memoir. In free flowing, wide ranging discussions, he reflects on such topics as why writers write, what makes a novel great, and what influenced his own work. Isherwood talks about his working relationship with W. H. Auden; his literary friendships with E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Stephen Spender, Aldous Huxley, and Somerset Maugham; and his work in the film industry in London and Hollywood. He also explores uncharted territory in candid comments on his own work, something not contained in his diaries. Isherwood on Writing uncovers an important and often misunderstood time in Isherwood s life in America. The lectures present, in James J. Berg s words, an example of a man, comfortable in his own sexuality and self, trying to talk about himself and his own life in a society that is not yet ready to hear the whole story. A major figure in twentieth century fiction and the gay rights movement, Christopher Isherwood 1904 1986 is the author of many books, including A Single Man and Down There on a Visit, available from Minnesota. James J. Berg is dean of liberal arts and sciences at Lake Superior College in Duluth, Minnesota. He is editor, with Chris Freeman, of The Isherwood Century: Essays on the Life and Work of Christopher Isherwood winner of the Lambda Award and Conversations with Christopher Isherwood. Claude Summers is professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Dearborn and author of many works, including Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall.

The Sixties: Diaries Volume Two

This second volume of Christopher Isherwood’s remarkable diaries opens on his fifty sixth birthday, as the fifties give way to the decade of social and sexual revolution. Isherwood takes the reader from the bohemian sunshine of Southern California to a London finally swinging free of post war gloom, to the racy cosmopolitanism of New York and to the raw Australian outback. He charts his ongoing quest for spiritual certainty under the guidance of his Hindu guru, and he reveals in reckless detail the emotional drama of his love for the American painter Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior and struggling to establish his own artistic identity. The diaries are crammed with wicked gossip and probing psychological insights about the cultural icons of the time Francis Bacon, Richard Burton, Leslie Caron, Marianne Faithfull, David Hockney, Mick Jagger, Hope Lange, W. Somerset Maugham, John Osborne, Vanessa Redgrave, Tony Richardson, David O. Selznick, Igor Stravinsky, Gore Vidal, and many others. But the diaries are most revealing about Isherwood himself his fiction including A Single Man and Down There on a Visit, his film writing, his college teaching, and his affairs of the heart. He moves easily from Beckett to Brando, from arthritis to aggression, from Tennessee Williams to foot powder, from the opening of Cabaret on Broadway which he skipped to a close analysis of Gide. In the background run references to the political and historical events of the period: the anxieties of the Cold War, Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight, de Gaulle and Algeria, the eruption of violence in America’s inner cities, the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, the moon landing, and the raising and lowering of hemlines. Isherwood is well known for his prophetic portraits of a morally bankrupt Europe on the eve of World War II; in this unparalleled chronicle, The Sixties, he turns his fearless eye on the decade that more than any other has shaped the way we live now.

Why are You Telling Me This?

Among the most distinguished twentieth century English novelists, Christopher Isherwood author of The Berlin Stories, Down There on a Visit, and A Single Man is equally famous for the meticulous journals he kept and later published. Numbering thousands of pages at the time of his death in 1986, his journals were a frequent source for his fiction and nonfiction. It is therefore not surprising that Isherwood made a record of his personal reading. Throughout much of his life, he kept an annual list of books read, along with his opinions of them. At some point, he began a separate notebook quoting specific passages from books that most influenced his thinking. These selections, spanning the time period from the earliest Upanishads to the contemporary, comprise his commonplace book. Isherwood’s collection differs from those of many writers, however, because it is not a compilation of ideas, conversations with others, and comments on his reading. Rather, that material is found in his journals. Why are You Telling Me This?? is an annotated list of readings selected during the last forty five years of his life. Among the works excerpted are novels, essays, and letters by Saint Augustine, Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Marcel Proust, E.M. Forster, Federico Garc a Lorca, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Tennessee Williams, Shirley Jackson, Ian Fleming, Andy Warhol, and John Lennon. Don Bachardy is the president of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation and was the late writer’s partner of thirty three years. James White is the Christopher Isherwood Foundation’s executive director.