Isherwood, Christopher William Bradshaw 1904-86
US novelist

Born in Disley, Cheshire, England, he was educated at Repton and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and studied medicine at King's College London (1928-29), but gave it up to teach English in Germany (1930-33). His best-known works, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), were based on his experiences in the decadence of post-slump, pre-Hitler Berlin. In collaboration with W H Auden, a school friend, he wrote three prose-verse plays with political overtones, which use Expressionist technique, music-hall parody and ample symbolism to portray the social climate: The Dog beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1937) and On the Frontier (1938). He travelled in China with Auden in 1938 and wrote Journey to a War (1939). In 1939 he emigrated to California to be a scriptwriter for MGM and in 1946 took US citizenship. The Broadway hit I am a Camera (1951), and the musical Cabaret (1968), were based on his earlier Berlin stories, especially Sally Bowles (1937). Later novels include Prater Violet (1945), The World in the Evening (1954) and Meeting by the River (1967). He also translated the Hindu epic poem the Bhagavad Gita (with Swami Prabhavananda, 1944) and Baudelaire's Intimate Journals (1947), and wrote several autobiographical books.

Bibliography: Christopher and His Kind (1963)