In the 1960s, Christopher Isherwood gave a series of lectures at California universities. During this time Isherwood, who would liberate the memoir and become the founding father of modern gay writing, spoke openly for the first time about his craft—on writing for film, theater, and novels—and on spirituality.
The Anglo-American novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood is best known for his novels about Berlin in the early 1930s. These books are detached but humorous studies of dubious characters leading seedy expatriate lives in the German capital. Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood was born on Aug. 26, 1904, in High Lane, Cheshire, England.
Isherwood also explores how minority identity resists social norms, however he rejects the concept of an inherent identity, causing his protagonist to seem somewhat conformist. Written and set in 1962, A Single Man takes place during a time where views on family life and sexuality remained puritanical but ideas were beginning to be questioned.
It would become the open secret of 20th-century British literature. Isherwood compared it to the other works by Forster and found it to be “both inferior and superior to them: inferior as an artwork, superior because of its purer passion, its franker declaration of its author’s faith. This moved Christopher tremendously on first reading.”.
The Culture Trip Literary City Guide To Berlin. Share this article:. (a period brilliantly captured by Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories). The city was then divided for nearly half a century, forcing writers both east and west to sneak each other’s works across the Wall, only to have today resurfaced as the uncontested center of.