Birthday: "At one campus where I was lecturing, I asked a friend, "How many of my colleagues know I'm gay?" He answered, "All of them." I wasn't surprised. But, just the same, it was kind of spooky, because not one of them had ever given me the faintest sign that he or she knew. If I had spoken about it myself, most of them would have felt it was in bad taste."

Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (1904-1986)

Author

Son of a professional British soldier and a commercial family's daughter, Isherwood grew up on his family’s estate and had the luxury of leaving Cambridge without a degree in 1925.  He spent the rest of his life collecting literary friends, having romantic dalliances, and writing books.

He met the poet W.H. Auden in 1925 while managing a string quartet and reading medicine in a lackluster manner. They traveled to Germany, fell in with another writer-to-be, Stephen Spender. It was a sort of gay Bloomsbury and a good time was had by all. Berlin in the Twenties was less obsessed by some issues than other capitals.

During the rise of the Nazis, Isherwood spent less time in Germany, finally leaving with Auden for China in 1938. They researched a book and then decamped to the US on a temporary visa- part of a small exodus of British artists who got very bad press for leaving King and Country as war loomed.

Isherwood settled in southern California and spent the war years doing volunteer work and studying Vedantic meditation. His Berlin Diaries (1935-1939)- well-received when published- took on a new postwar life as a stage play, I Am A Camera (1951), then a movie with the same title in 1955; then as a Broadway musical, Cabaret (1966), and a movie of the same name in 1972.

A US citizen after 1945, Isherwood met an aspiring artist, Don Bachardy, in 1948. Though his youth- thirty years Isherwood’s junior- raised some eyebrows, Isherwood’s wealth, cultivated manners, and even better-cultivated friends made the couple an LA fixture for almost forty years (Bachardy, now 83, is a highly-regarded portraitist who still lives in their Malibu home.

Isherwood was a prolific writer, but his reputation rests on his literary friendships, his Berlin books, and his 1964 novel, A Single Man.