Christopher & His Kind: A Biography

Christopher & His Kind: A Biography
by Christopher Isherwood

Christopher & His Kind: A Biography
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Book Summary Information

Author: Christopher Isherwood
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1987-06-01
ISBN: 0374520364
Number of pages: 4494
Publisher: North Point Press

Book Reviews of Christopher & His Kind: A Biography

Book Review: Isherwood discovers Berlin and boys
Summary: 5 Stars

Christopher Isherwood makes it clear in his introduction that this book will be candid about his homosexuality. It begins with his move to Berlin and covers the time up to his move to America. There are fascinating anecdotes: the character of Sally Bowles (later made famous by "Cabaret") was named after the then unknown but handsome American Paul Bowles. Isherwood read E.M. Forster's "Maurice" in manuscript, decades before it was published. These are just a few. And note: his "Diaries: Volume 1" begins just *after* this book (the earlier diaries were destroyed)

Summary of Christopher & His Kind: A Biography

Christopher and His Kind is an intriguing slice of autobiography. It covers ten years in the writer's life-from 1929, when Isherwood left England to sp a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to the beginning of 1939, when he arrived in New York to start a life in the States.
The book revealingly contrasts fact with fiction-the real people Isherwood met in Germany with the portraits of them in his two Berlin novels, who then appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.But one does not need to be familiar with his body of work to appreciate the powerful and compelling story he tells here. Isherwood left Berlin in 1933, after Hitler came to power. For the next four years, he wandered around Europe-through Greece, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France-with a German boy named Heinz.
The characters in the book include W.H. Auden, Stephen Sper, and E.M. Forster as well as the literary circles of Somerset Maugham and Virginia Woolf. Chronicling German refugees and the British colony in Portugal, the Group Theatre company (which performed the three Auden-Isherwood plays) and the film studio where he worked and which he used as the setting for Prater Violet, Christopher and His Kind is an engrossing and powerfully rered portrait of a decade in the life of a major writer.

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