Lavender: Isherwood in Transit

Review of Isherwood in Transit edited by James J. Berg and Chris Freeman

New perspectives on Christopher Isherwood as a searching and transnational writerThis book follows up Berg and Freeman’s 2015 The American Isherwood. There, they assessed him as an American writer (achieving citizenship in 1946); here, contributors explore the decades Isherwood spent wandering, geographically and spiritually. The seventeen essays resulted from a conference after the opening of Isherwood’s vast archive at The Huntington, and approach Isherwood in light of his peripatetic days and his continuing spiritual, Vedantic explorations of the spirit. Xenobe Purvis’s “A Faith of Personal Sincerity” and Wendy Moffat’s “The Archival “I”” both examine Isherwood’s friendship with E.M. Forster, one examining debt to individualism, the other focusing on the “future of queer biography.” Other participants include Barrie Jean Borich, Robert L. Caserio, Calvin W. Keogh, and Edmund White. Be sure to read Christopher Bram’s excellent foreword. 

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