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by Katherine Bucknell
A stunningly intimate exploration of the writer and gay cultural icon and of his lifelong search for authenticity.
The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood―the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man―was born an heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait.
Isherwood began his career depicting the psychological wreckage of World War I. Living in Berlin, his stories and plays (cowritten with W. H. Auden), inspired by the city's nightlife and artistic underbelly, made him famous. With the rise of fascism and the Gestapo's arrest of his boyfriend, Isherwood left the country and found work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where he became the disciple of a Hindu monk, Swami Prabhavananda. Together they translated the Bhagavad Gita.
Isherwood shed his family ghosts and became a chief instigator of the cultural shift that made gay liberation possible. Every step of the journey served his writing; one of our greatest diarists, he recorded his experiences and transformed them in fiction and memoir. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless, penetrating, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations for self-understanding and happiness. Here is Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.
"A penetrating exploration of the life and work of the acclaimed novelist, memoirist, and pioneering figure in gay culture... . The author renders a sweeping portrait of Isherwood's remarkable life journey ... An engrossing, rigorously documented study of a 20th-century literary trailblazer." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Bucknell brings scholarly acumen and bravura storytelling to her stunning biography ... This is a monumental achievement." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This absorbing biography burrows deeply into each stage of Isherwood's continuous intellectual and spiritual evolutions ... Isherwood questioned everything in life, ardently examining himself, and Bucknell's marvelously knowledgeable portrait reveals the full dimensions of his richly contemplative life." ―Booklist (starred review)
"This book―profoundly sympathetic to its subject, lucidly and excitingly written―is both a fast-paced story of an extraordinary life and a broadly illuminating history of vast cultural changes across eight decades and four continents. Katherine Bucknell, having edited four volumes of Isherwood's diaries, has distilled her expertise into the finest literary biography of its century." ―Edward Mendelson, author of Early Auden, Later Auden
"A roller-coaster ride through a genuinely remarkable life. Katherine Bucknell has had full access to all the primary sources―and it shows. Her Isherwood is both fascinating and dangerous, as reckless in his relationships as he was scrupulous in his art. His virtues shine, and his faults are documented with admirable candour." ―Neil Bartlett, author of Address Book
"The best biographies make the reader feel they are looking over the subject's shoulder, watching them grow up and into life. Katherine Bucknell does exactly this, marshalling an enormous range of scholarship with insight, empathy, and humor. Her long immersion in Isherwood's work and life is lightly worn, she writes beautifully, and whether she is invoking declining English country-house life, Weimar Berlin, mid-century Hollywood, or the alternative cultures of California, one trusts her judgment implicitly. Christopher Isherwood Inside Out matches its subject's narrative skill and psychological insight, and brilliantly illuminates his search for a new way to live." ―Roy Foster, author of W. B. Yeats: A Life
This information about Christopher Isherwood Inside Out was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Katherine Bucknell is the editor of four volumes of diaries by Christopher Isherwood, The Animals, a volume of letters between Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy, and W.H. Auden's Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928. She is director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, as well as a founder of the W. H. Auden Society and co-editor of Auden Studies. Bucknell is also the author of four novels, Canarino, Leninsky Prospekt, What You Will, and +1. She lives in London.
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