Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

Description

The first volume of Christopher Isherwood's intimate and insightful diaries. In 1939 Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden emigrated together to the United States. In spare, luminous prose these diaries describe Isherwood's search for a new life in California; his work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, his pacifism during World War II and his friendships with such gifted artists and intellectuals as Garbo, Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Charles Laughton, Gielgud, Olivier, Richard Burton and Aldous Huxley. Throughout this period, Isherwood continued to write novels and sustain his literary friendships - with E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams and others. He turned to his diaries several times a week to record jokes and gossip, observations about his adopted country, philosophy and mystical insights. His devotion to his diary was a way of accounting for himself; he used it as both a discipline and a release.

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing his first novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial. He spent four years in Berlin writing Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based, and then in 1939 moved to America. He became a US citizen in 1946, where he wrote another five novels including A Single Man, a travel book and a biography of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. In the 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works- Kathleen and Frank, Christopher and His Kind and October, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.

A major literary event...an essential part of his oeuvre * Guardian * There is not a page that does not contain a good joke, original insight, deadly accurate description or delicious nugget of gossip... A major literary work, the diaries round off the writer both as man and artist. They are intimate and intensely personal * Independent on Sunday * There is plenty to enjoy in this first volume...Isherwood's is an exemplary twentieth-century life: assured and neurotic, fearless and fretful, generous and small-minded, forgiving and remorsefully judgemental * Financial Times * A pleasure to read... No word is wasted, and the casual-looking sentences create the impression that we are overhearing what is being said * Scotsman * Enthralling...Isherwood...struggles with his demons in spare, luminous and merciless prose -- Benjamin Evans * Sunday Telegraph *