British-American novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood is best known for his fictional autobiographies, a genre now known as “auto-fiction”, thinly disguised accounts of his personal experiences, journeys, and beliefs. Intimate, almost diaristic language pulls the reader into the mind of his self-reflective protagonists, coloring them vibrantly with desires, fears, flaws, and vices. Given how well Isherwood’s analytical mind lent to the creation of such realistic and captivating stories, we are all rather lucky he had such a rich life to draw from.

Born in England in 1904, Isherwood was a child of privilege, yet his family was emotionally — and physically, during his boarding school years — distant. Isherwood devoted his energy to school and to writing. He was classmates with poet W.H. Auden, and together the pair wrote three plays during their school days, a time which is detailed in Isherwood’s 1938 novel Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties. Their friendship and collaboration continued into adulthood, and soon their circle grew to include novelist Stephen Spender and other soon-to-be stars of the early twentieth century literary scene. Despite writing voraciously and enjoying adequate success, it was not until Isherwood moved to Berlin in the early 1930s that he found the subject that would catapult his career.

As a Brit in Germany during the last days of the Weimar Republic, Isherwood had a unique vantage point from which to view the infancy of Nazism, a rising beast that loomed behind the expatriates about whom Isherwood wrote. His two novels from this time, Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin were combined in the 1946 volume The Berlin Stories and marked Isherwood as a force to be reckoned with on the page. His distanced and wry account of seedy and shabby lives in the German capital inspired the 1951 play I Am a Camera and the smash 1966 musical Cabaret.

After the outbreak of World War II, Isherwood moved to Southern California to continue writing for the page and the screen, baring his soul to readers throughout. Among the works he produced during this time, A Single Man (1964), which follows a lonely homosexual man through the course of a single day, is a thinly fictionalized, starkly honest self-portrait. At this time, Isherwood also met and began to follow Indian philosopher and monk Swami Prabhavananda. Isherwood connected especially with the Hindu practice of Vedanta and wrote extensively on his relationship to the practices. He lived in Southern California with his partner, portraitist Don Bachardy, until his death in 1986.