Christopher Isherwood
1904-1986
Christopher Isherwood, byname of Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood, (born August 26, 1904, High Lane, Cheshire, England—died January 4, 1986, Santa Monica, California, U.S.), Anglo-American novelist and playwright best known for his novels about Berlin in the early 1930s. After working as a secretary and a private tutor, Isherwood gained a measure of coterie recognition with his first two novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932). During the 1930s he collaborated with his friend W.H. Auden on three verse dramas, including The Ascent of F6 (1936). But it had been in 1929 that he found the theme that was to make him widely known. Between 1929 and 1933 he lived in Berlin, gaining an outsider’s view of the simultaneous decay of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism. His novels Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935; The Last of Mr. Norris) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), which were later published together as The Berlin Stories, established his reputation as an important writer and inspired the play I Am a Camera (1951; film 1955) and the musical Cabaret (1966; film 1972). These books are detached but humorous studies of dubious characters leading seedy expatriate…
Films