Christopher Isherwood (born Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood; 26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an English and American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which was the basis for Cabaret (1966); A Single Man (1964), adapted into a film directed by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".
Isherwood was the elder son of Francis Edward Bradshaw Isherwood (1869–1915), known as Frank, a professional soldier in the York and Lancaster Regiment, and Kathleen Bradshaw Isherwood, née Machell Smith (1868–1960), the only daughter of a successful wine merchant. He was the grandson of John Henry Isherwood, squire of Marple Hall and Wyberslegh Hall, Cheshire, and he included among his ancestors the Puritan judge John Bradshaw, who signed the death warrant of King Charles I and served for two years as Lord President of the Council, effectively President of the English Republic.
Isherwood's father, Frank, was educated at the University of Cambridge and Sandhurst Military Academy, fought in the Boer War, and was killed in the First World War.
Isherwood's mother, Kathleen, was, through her own mother, a member of the wealthy Greene brewing family of Greene King, and Isherwood was a third cousin of the novelist Graham Greene, who was also related to the brewing family.
Isherwood was born in 1904 on his family's estate in Cheshire near Stockport in the north-west of England.
His parents christened their first son Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood. Between 1904 and 1913, the family holidayed on several occasions at Penmaenmawr in Wales, and Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. Isherwood was enrolled at St. Edmund's school, Hindhead, Surrey, beginning in 1914, where he met W. H. Auden, who became a life-long friend and colleague. In 1918, Isherwood left for Repton, his boarding school in Derbyshire.
At Repton, Isherwood met his lifelong friend Edward Upward, with whom he invented an imaginary English village called Mortmere, as related in his fictional autobiography, Lions and Shadows (1938). He went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, as a history scholar, but wrote jokes and limericks on his second-year academic exam and was asked to leave without a degree in 1925.
At Christmas 1925, he was reintroduced to a prep school friend, W. H. Auden. Through Auden, Isherwood met the younger poet Stephen Spender, who printed Auden's first collection, Poems (1928). Upward, Isherwood, Auden, and Spender were identified as the most exciting new literary group in England in the 1930s. Auden dubbed Isherwood the novelist in what came to be known as the Auden Group or Auden Generation. With Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice, Auden and Spender later attracted the name the MacSpaunday Poets, with which Isherwood is also associated.
After leaving Cambridge, Isherwood worked as a private tutor, and then as secretary to a string quartet led by the violinist André Mangeot. During this time, he completed his first novel, All the Conspirators, published in 1928, about the struggle for self-determination between children and their parents. Isherwood enrolled as a medical student at King's College London in October 1928, but he left after six months.
In March 1929, Isherwood joined Auden in Berlin, where Auden was spending a post-graduate year. His primary motivation for making the trip was the sexual freedom that Weimar-era Berlin offered, as he later wrote: "To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys". The ten-day visit changed Isherwood's life. He began an affair with a German boy whom he met at a cellar bar called The Cosy Corner, and he was "brought face to face with his tribe" at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science. Isherwood visited Berlin again in July and relocated there in November.
In Berlin, Isherwood completed his second novel, The Memorial (1932), about the impact of the First World War on his family and his generation. He also continued his habit of keeping a diary. In his diary, he gathered raw material for Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935), inspired by his real-life friendship with Gerald Hamilton, and for Goodbye to Berlin (1939), his portrait of the city in which Adolf Hitler was rising to power — enabled by poverty, unemployment, increasing attacks on Jews and Communists, and ignored by the defiant hedonism of night life in the cafés, bars, and brothels. Goodbye to Berlin included stories published in the leftist magazine New Writing, and it included Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles, in which he created his most famous character, based on a young Englishwoman, Jean Ross, with whom he briefly shared a flat.
In the United States, the Berlin novels were published together as The Berlin Stories in 1945. In 1951, Goodbye to Berlin was adapted for the New York stage by John van Druten using the title I Am a Camera, taken from Isherwood's opening paragraphs. The play inspired the hit Broadway musical Cabaret (1966), later adapted to film as Cabaret in 1972.
Isherwood was among the literary contributors to the New Party's weekly paper Action, which was launched shortly before the October 1931 election. He dubbed the publication "the rankest John Bull stuff" and was interested more in the financial compensation that came from contributing.
In 1932, the 27-year-old Isherwood started a relationship with Heinz Neddermeyer, then 16 or 17 years old. They fled Nazi Germany together in May 1933, traveling initially to Greece. Neddermeyer was refused entry to England in January 1934, launching an odyssey in search of a country where they could settle together. They lived in the Canary Islands, Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Sintra, Portugal, while trying to obtain a new nationality and passport for Neddermeyer.
In May 1937, while he and Isherwood were living in Luxembourg, Neddermeyer was suddenly expelled to Germany. Neddermeyer was arrested the next day by the Gestapo for draft evasion and reciprocal onanism. Neddermeyer was sentenced to three and a half years of hard labor and military service. He married in 1938, and the couple had one child, a son, born in 1940. Neddermeyer survived the war, and in 1956 sent Isherwood a letter asking for money to help escape East Germany, which Isherwood provided. The last known contact between the two men occurred circa 1972 when Isherwood sought Neddermeyer's permission to publicise their relationship in his forthcoming memoir Christopher and His Kind. Shocked by the frankness of Isherwood's memoir in discussing their relationship, Neddermeyer stated its publication would lead to his suicide. The two men never communicated again.
During this period, Isherwood returned often to London, where he took his first movie-writing job, working with Viennese director Berthold Viertel on the film Little Friend (1934). He collaborated with Auden on three plays: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938) – all produced by Robert Medley and Rupert Doone's Group Theatre. He also worked on Lions and Shadows (1938), a fictionalised autobiography of his education — both in and out of school — in the 1920s.
In January 1938, Isherwood and Auden traveled to China to write Journey to a War (1939), about the Sino-Japanese conflict. They returned to England the following summer via the United States and decided to emigrate there in January 1939.
While living in Hollywood, California, Isherwood befriended Truman Capote, an up-and-coming young writer who would be influenced by Isherwood's Berlin Stories, most specifically in the traces of the story "Sally Bowles" that surface in Capote's famed novella Breakfast at Tiffany's.