Christopher and His Kind
Isherwood’s most celebrated and revealing memoir, now back in print!
Christopher and His Kind covers the most memorable ten years in the writer’s life-from 1929, when Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. Isherwood candidly describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggles to save his companion, a German man named Heinz, from the Nazis.
"Indispensable for admirers of this truly masterly writer." New York Times Book Review
Indispensable for admirers of this truly masterly writer.
New York Times Book Review
Originally published in 1976, Christopher and His Kind covers the most memorable ten years in the writer’s life-from 1929, when Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. His friends and colleagues during this time included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E. M. Forster, as well as colorful figures he met in Germany and later fictionalized in his two Berlin novels-who appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.
What most impressed the first readers of this memoir, however, was the candor with which he describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggles to save his companion, Heinz, from the Nazis. An engrossing and dramatic story and a fascinating glimpse into a little-known world, Christopher and His Kind remains one of Isherwood’s greatest achievements.
Indispensable for admirers of this truly masterly writer.
New York Times Book Review
The best prose writer in English . . . The later Isherwood is even better than the early cameraman.
Gore Vidal
Isherwood included everything here: travel and art, sex and politics. Love remains important, even in the shadow of Hitler. And he did it in prose as lucid as water.
Huffington Post
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