Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) was an English-American novelist, playwright, and memoirist whose fiction drew on Berlin life, political upheaval, and gay experience.

Goodbye to Berlin: A 1939 novella sequence depicting life in Berlin as Nazism rises. Its Berlin stories supplied material for Isherwood’s international reputation and later adaptations.
Weimar Republic: Germany’s parliamentary republic from 1918 to 1933, marked by cultural experimentation and political conflict. Isherwood lived in Berlin during its final years and made the city central to his fiction.
Berlin Alexanderplatz: Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel portraying working-class life and urban modernity in Berlin. Its experimental city portrait offers a distinct contemporary counterpoint to Isherwood’s Berlin fiction.
Gay literature: Literature that represents same-sex desire, relationships, or LGBTQ+ lives. Isherwood’s later fiction and memoir became landmarks in openly gay writing.
The Berlin Stories: A 1945 volume combining Isherwood’s Berlin novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. This collection brought two Berlin works together for American readers.
W. H. Auden: An English poet and librettist whose collaborations and friendship with Isherwood spanned decades. Auden encouraged Isherwood’s writing and collaborated with him on plays and travel books.
Auden–Isherwood plays: A series of collaborative plays written by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. Their stage collaborations show Isherwood working beyond the autobiographical novel.
Homosexuality in Nazi Germany: The persecution and regulation of same-sex relations under the Nazi regime. The threat of repression shadows the Berlin world Isherwood recorded.
A Single Man: A 1964 novel following a gay English professor through one day in Los Angeles. Its intimate portrait of grief and gay life became one of Isherwood’s most enduring novels.
Berlin: Germany’s capital, a major European political and cultural center. The city’s nightlife and instability informed several of Isherwood’s best-known works.

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