Christopher Isherwood
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"The clearest mental image most of us have of cabaret is Liza Minnelli in Cabaret (1972) with its iconic songs "Willkommen" (1966) and "Life Is a Cabaret". The imagery of this musical was inspired by German cabaret as witnessed by Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin (1939)."--Sholem Stein |
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Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (August 26, 1904 – January 4, 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist, author of The Berlin Stories.
Cabaret
In 1931 Isherwood met Jean Ross, the inspiration of his fictional character Sally Bowles; he also met Gerald Hamilton, the inspiration for the fictional Mr. Norris in a series of short stories collected under the title Goodbye to Berlin (1939). These provided the inspiration for the play I Am a Camera, the subsequent musical Cabaret and the film of the same name.
List of works
- All the Conspirators (1928; new edn. 1957 with new foreword)
- The Memorial (1932)
- Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935; US edn. titled The Last of Mr. Norris)
- The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935, with W. H. Auden)
- The Ascent of F6 (1937, with W. H. Auden)
- Sally Bowles (1937; later included in Goodbye to Berlin)
- On the Frontier (1938, with W. H. Auden)
- Lions and Shadows (1938, autobiography)
- Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
- Journey to a War (1939, with W. H. Auden)
- Prater Violet (1945)
- The Berlin Stories (1945; contains Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin; reissued as The Berlin of Sally Bowles, 1975)
- The Condor and the Cows (1949, South-American travel diary)
- What Vedanta Means to Me (1951, pamphlet)
- The World in the Evening (1954)
- Down There on a Visit (1962)
- An Approach to Vedanta (1963)
- A Single Man (1964)
- Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965)
- Exhumations (1966; journalism and stories)
- A Meeting by the River (1967)
- Essentials of Vedanta (1969)
- Kathleen and Frank (1971, about his parents)
- Frankenstein: The True Story (1973, with Don Bachardy; based on their 1973 filmscript)
- Christopher and His Kind (1976, autobiography)
- My Guru and His Disciple (1980)
- October (1980, with Don Bachardy)
- The Mortmere Stories (with Edward Upward) (1994)
- Where Joy Resides: An Isherwood Reader (1989; selections ed. by Don Bachardy and James P. White)
- Diaries: 1939-1960, ed. by Katherine Bucknell (1996)
- Jacob's Hands: A Fable (1997) originally co-written with Aldous Huxley
- Lost Years: A Memoir 1945-1951, ed. by Katherine Bucknell (2000)
- Kathleen and Christopher, ed. by Lisa Colletta (2005, letters to his mother)
Translations:
- Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals (1930; rev. edn. 1947)
- The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita (with Swami Prabhavananda, 1944)
- Shankara's Crest-Jewel of Discrimination (with Swami Prabhavananda, 1947)
- How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali (with Swami Prabhavananda, 1953)