| Christopher
Isherwood |
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| Nationality - English |
Profession - Author |
| Date of birth - 26 Aug 1904
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Date of death - 1986 |
| Place of birth
- Wyberslegh : Cheshire |
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Christopher Isherwood was born at Wyberslegh, Cheshire, England on August 26, 1904.
His mother, Kathleen Bradshaw-Isherwood, was a gifted artist. His father, Frank, an officer in the British army, was killed at Ypres in May, 1915, in the first World War.
Following school at St. Edmund's and Repton, he began attending Cambridge University in 1923. After just one year, he left the university to try writing.
While writing his first two novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial, he also worked as a private secretary and briefly attended medical school. By 1929, he moved to Berlin.
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In Berlin Isherwood searched for direction in his life and sought escape from the sexual constriction of England to the more open lifestyle and experiences about which his friend W.H. Auden had written him. Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s was the cultural and artistic center of Europe, and Isherwood found there his sexual identity as well as raw material for his writing.
The best-known result of his observations and experiences is The Berlin Stories, later adapted as the play and film I Am a Camera and as the musical Cabaret. In recording his experiences in Berlin, Isherwood began to develop the mature authorial voice that he would continue to employ and refine through all his works.
Christopher Isherwood enjoyed friendships with many authors, beginning with Auden and Spender. Isherwood was not just a loyal and congenial friend who encouraged, and was encouraged by, his literary colleagues. He often gave generously of his time and his literary acumen in analyzing and critiquing manuscripts sent to him by his fellow writers.
In the last 25 years of his life, Isherwood's writings reflect the mature views of a life spent in developing his authorial voice and message. Down There On a Visit is a novel in which he reinterprets his past from 1928 to 1953 in a series of distinct episodes linked only by the continuing and developing voice of the narrator.
In Christopher and His Kind, he reassesses his life in the 1930's, writing frankly about his sexual coming of age while under enormous pressure to conform to a heterosexual society. He writes in the book, "My will is to live according to my nature, and to find a place where I can be what I am." In A Single Man, the story of one day in the life of a Los Angeles man whose long-time partner has died, Isherwood's portrayal of one gay man's life speaks to the over-all human condition. Both humorous and deeply moving, the novel is widely considered to be Isherwood's masterpiece, as well as an under-valued gem of twentieth-century literature.
Christopher Isherwood died in Santa Monica, California. January 4, 1986. |
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Christopher Isherwood
bibliography - 28
listed |
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