Scarica Christopher Isherwood: A Life in Literature and Love e più Guide, Progetti e Ricerche in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD Christopher Isherwood (26 August 1904 — 4 January 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel. Isherwood was bom in 1904 on his family's estate in Cheshire near Manchester in the north of England. He attended a boarding school in Derbyshire, then he went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, as a history scholar, wrote jokes and limericks on his second year and was asked to leave without a degree in 1925. At Christmas 1925, he was reintroduced to W. H. Auden. Through Auden, Isherwood met the younger poet, Stephen Spender, who printed Auden's first collection, Poems (1928). Upward, Isherwood, Auden, and Spender were identified as the most exciting new literary group in England in the 19305. In March 1929, Isherwood joined Auden in Berlin, where Auden was spending a post-graduate year. The ten-day visit changed Isherwood's life, beginning his liberation as a homosexual. He visited Berlin again in July, and moved there in November. In Berlin, Isherwood completed his second novel, The Memoria! (1932), about the impact of the First World War on his family and his generation. He also continued his habit of keeping a diary. In his diary, he gathered raw material for Goodbye to Berlin (1939), his portrait of the city in which Adolf Hitler was rising to power. Goodbye to Berlin induded stories published in the leftist magazine, New Writing, and it induded Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles, in which he created his most famous character, based on a young Englishwoman, Jean Ross with whom he briefly shared a flat. In 1932, Isherwood started a relationship with a young German, Heinz Neddermeyer. They fled Nazi Germany together in May 1933, traveling initialy to Greece. Neddermeyer was refused entry to England launching an odyssey in search of a sexual homeland where they could settle together. They lived in the Canary Islands, Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Sintra, Portugal, while trying to obtain a new nationality and passport for Neddermeyer. In May 1937, Neddermeyer was arrested by the Gestapo for draft evasion. During this period, Isherwood retumed often to London where he took his first movie-writing job, some collaboration with Auden on three plays In January 1938, Isherwood and Auden traveled to China to write Journey to a War (1939) about the China-Japanese conilict. After retuming in the United States in 1939 while living in Hollywood, California, Isherwood befriended with some up-coming young writers and in 1946 he finally became an American citizen. On Valentine's Day 1953, at the age of 48, he met the teenager Don Bachardy. Despite the age difference, this meeting began a partnership that, though interrupted by affairs and separations, continued until the end of Isherwood's life. The 30-year age difference between Isherwood and Bachardy raised eyebrows at the time, with Bachardy, in his own words, "regarded as a sort ofchild prostitute,"# but the two became a well'knoun and well-established couple in Southerm Californian society with many Hollywood friends. In the opinion of many reviewers, Ishenwood's finest achievement was his 1964 novel A Single Man, that depicted a day in the life of George, a middle-aged, gay Englishman who is a professor at a Los Angeles university. The novel was also adapted into the film, A Single Man, in 2009. Isherwood and Bachardy lived together in Santa Monica for the rest of Isherwood's life. Ishervood was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981, and died of the disease on 4 January 1986 at his Santa Monica home, aged 81. GOODBYE TO BERLIN Is a 1939 novel by Christopher Isherwood set in Weimar Germany. The novel, a semiautobiographical account of British author Christopher Isherwood's time in 19305 Berlin, describes pre-Nazi Germany and the people he met. It is episodic, dealing with a large cast over a period of several years from late 1930 to early 1933. It is written as a conneded series of six short stories and novellas. The book, first published in 1939, highlights the groups of people who would be most at risk from Nazi intimidation. It was described by contemporary writer George Orwell as "brilliant sketches of a society in decay". In her book Anti-Nazi Modernism, author Mia Spiro remarks that "Despite that which they could not know, the novels that Isherwvood wrote do reveal the historical, cultural, political, and social conditions in 1930s Europe that made the continent ripe for disaster”.
