Isherwood was born in 1906 in Disley, Cheshire, the son of an
army officer, who was killed in World War I. In his childhood
Isherwood travelled around with his father's regiment. In 1914 he
was sent to St. Edmund's preparatory school, where he made
friends with W.H. Auden, later his lover. Isherwood studied at Cambridge,
without taking a degree. After Cambridge he worked as a private
tutor, and from 1930 to 1933 he taught English in Germany. The
experiences provided him with the material for his most famous
books, The Berlin Stories - two tales of the city, Mr
Norris Changes Trains, and Goodbye to Berlin, which
inspired the musical Cabaret. In 1938 Isherwood and Auden
went to China, and Isherwood wrote Journey To A War. With Auden
he emigrated to the US, becoming an American citizen
in 1946.
Isherwood settled in 1939 in southern California, where he
worked as a teacher and worked on Hollywood scripts. During 1941-42, he
worked at a Quaker hostel in Pennsylvania with refugees from
Europe. In 1943 he became a follower of Swami Prabhavananda,
producing several works on Indian Vedanta in the following
decades, and several more novels. In 1975, he won the Brandeis
Medal for Fiction. His novels increasingly referred openly to his
homosexuality, and he became a leading spokesman for gay rights.
He died in Santa Monica, on January 4, 1986.
Selected works:
- All The Conspirators, 1928
- (translation)The Intimate Journals of Charles Baudelaire,
1930
- The Memorial, 1932
- The Dance of Death, 1933 (with W.H.
Auden)
- Mr. Norris Changes Trains, 1935
- The Ascent of F6, 1936 (with W.H.
Auden)
- Sally Bowles, 1937
- (translation)A Penny for the Poor, 1937 (by Bertolt Brecht)
- Lions and Shadows, 1938
- Journey to a War, 1939 (with W.H. Auden)
- Goodbye to Berlin, 1939
- (translation) The Song of the God: The Bhagavad-Gita, 1944 (with
Swami Prabhavananda)
- (ed.)Vedanta for the Western World, 1944
- Prater Violet, 1945
- (translation)Shankara's Crest-Jewel of Discrimination, 1947 (with
Swami Prabhavananda)
- The Condor and the Cows, 1949
- (film script)The Great Sinner, 1949, with Ladislav Fodor,
directed by Robert Siodmak, starring Gregory Peck, Walter
Huston, and Ava Gardner, adapted from a story based on Dostoyevsky's
novel The Gambler
- (ed.) Vedanta for the Modern World, 1951
- (translation) How to know God, 1953 (with Swami Prabhavananda)
- The World in the Evening, 1954
- (ed)Great English Short Stories, 1957
- Down There On A Visit, 1962
- Approach to Vedanta, 1963
- A Single Man, 1964
- Ramakrishna and his Disciples, 1965
- film script with Terry Southern: The Loved One, 1965,
dir. by Tony Richardson, based on Evelyn Waugh's novel
- Exhumations, 1966
- A Meeting by the River, 1967
- Essentials of Vedanta, 1969
- Kathleen and Frank, 1971
- Frankenstein: The True Story, 1973 (with Don Bachardy)
- Christopher and his Kind, 1977
- My Guru and his Disciple, 1980
- People Ought to Know, 1982 (with S. Mangeot)
- The Wishing Tree, 1987
- Where Joy Resides, 1989