Dense and fascinating biography of Christopher Isherwood. Gives much contextual information about his time spent in England, the USA, and of course, Berlin where Berlin Stories was inspired. I have always known of Christopher Isherwood, because of Cabaret.

The writer, Katherine Bucknell, certainly did her homework as this book is lengthy and very well researched. It seems that she left no stone unturned.

Isherwood led a fascinating, celebrity filled life. He was pretty much openly gay during times when that could have been punishable by death. I am really glad that I saw this book on Net Galley and read it. It provided much more information on the writer of one of my favorite stories of all time.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux , as well as Net Galley for the ARC.

“Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out” is an insightful biography of the prolific English writer, author of “Goodbye to Berlin” (the inspiration behind “Cabaret”), “A Single Man,” and “Christopher and His Kind,” among others. Katherine Bucknell, director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, as well as editor of several collections of Isherwood’s diaries and letters, draws on his letters, journals, creative work, and interviews to build an extensive look at this talented writer.

Isherwood was born in 1904 to landed gentry, with properties, a large house, and servants. His father was in the British Army and the family moved around for a while, including a stint in Ireland. His father went to fight in World War I and died in France, leaving his mother to look after Isherwood and his younger brother. This clearly affected Isherwood, although he wouldn’t discuss it until much later. While this section of his childhood is important to Isherwood’s later development, the many details make for slow reading.

The book really picks up when Isherwood travels to Germany in 1929, where he fully embraced his sexuality. In Berlin, he first lived next door to Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, one of the first sexology research centers advocating for decriminalization of homosexuality. Isherwood met many young German men, falling in love with Heinz Neddermeyer, who he tried to help get out of the country as the Nazis gained power. His short novels “Mr. Norris Changes Trains” and “Goodbye to Berlin” are fictionalized versions of the people he met and his experiences there, although they don’t tell the whole truth about his sexual adventures.

Decades later, as the German translation of “Christopher and His Kind,” a nonfiction account of Isherwood’s time in Germany, was to appear, Neddermeyer, now with a family, wrote to Isherwood despairing that the book would out him. The translation wouldn’t be published until after Isherwood’s death.

Isherwood emigrated to America with his school friend, the poet W.H. Auden, in 1939. The two collaborated on several plays and covered Japan’s invasion of China, even sleeping together several times. This move, near the start of World War II, plus Isherwood’s pacifist refusal to fight, caused bitter feelings with some friends in England.

He settled in Los Angeles where he discovered the Vedanta Hindu-inspired philosophy. He translated the Bhagavad Gita with the religious leader Prabhavananda, who he deeply admired. Although Isherwood struggled to practice all of Vedanta’s teachings, including celibacy, the religion accepted him completely.

He also met Don Bachardy, with whom he’d spend the rest of his life. Thirty years younger than Isherwood, Bachardy shared with Bucknell the challenges in their relationship. While Isherwood encouraged him to study art in England, Bachardy had affairs there, as did Isherwood back in LA. In their letters, Isherwood was “Dobbin” while Bachardy was “Kitty.” Seeing their love grow and develop is one of this book’s pleasures.

Despite the biography’s length and slow start, it reveals an honest yet sympathetic look at Isherwood’s life and work. It should inspire readers to pick up his books, either again or for the first time.

I would like to thank Farrar, Straus and Giroux , as well as Net Galley for the opportunity to read this book as an ARC. I was aware of Christopher Isherwood, primarily as the writer of the stories that became Cabaret. This is a lengthy, well written and well researched book about the complex life and times of Isherwood. It is extremely well researched and comprehensive. He led a long, and in many ways, a star studded life. He was also a homosexual in Germany at a time when that meant death. It is a long book, but a faascinating one. I learned so much about Isherwood, and his times and his life. I am very glad that I read this book. Thank you Katherine Bucknell for writing it.

Any account of Isherwood’s life lives and dies by how the writer handles two things: the life before Berlin, and the life after.

For Berlin made Isherwood. It gave him his two most memorable characters - Arthur Norris and Sally Bowles - and established the clear, compelling style that stays coolly neutral even as it catalogues disaster. (His previous, more conventional novels were relative duds.) It gave his contemporaries their first real look at the growth of Nazism, from the fringe to fledgling dictatorship. These glimpses of reportage - the ruined shops, the approving smiles of the well-heeled towards mob thuggery - remain an urgent warning from history.

In some quarters, people still hold forth, often heatedly, against Isherwood and his contemporary WH Auden for fleeing to America in wartime. Perhaps there is something in it. But this perhaps ignores the crucial difference between the two men. After cutting himself off from the landscapes that had nourished his best work, Auden made art out of himself and his own preoccupations. By contrast, Isherwood immersed himself in the new locale and its citizenry. The late masterpiece of Isherwood’s career, A Single Man, remains a beautiful flower grown in American soil, and continues to wrong-foot his dafter critics.

Domestic bliss is a hard thing to come by and harder still to bring off on the page. However stormy, the relationship with long-term partner Don Bachardy is handled well and provides a wealth of insight into Isherwood’s mostly happy final years.

I would have preferred this admirable but overlong book more had the opening chapters been shortened and less bogged down by the author’s need to scry Isherwood’s future in every minor childhood detail. At one point, readers may well wonder whether at any moment the contents of Isherwood’s potty are about to be scrutinised with all the rigour of a Greek Soothsayer.

I admit I was drawn to this title simply because I have always loved the film “Cabaret” based on Isherwood’s stories set in pre WW2 Berlin.
This is a comprehensive and fascinating work detailing a life that began in privilege and where societal expectations were rigid and confined. But in a changing world, Isherwood embraces a lifestyle unexpected full of travel and relationships, all shaping the man and writer he became.
Travel delighted and informed, creative minds challenged and intrigued, and his homosexual lifestyle was never up for debate.
Katherine Bucknall’s study of Isherwood’s life is meticulously documented with full references and detailed background. This made it interesting to me as a historical snapshot as well as a story of a life well lived. Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with a complimentary ARC. .

This is a very well-done, very detailed and comprehensive biography of Christopher Isherwood, the writer upon whose works the stage musical and the film “Cabaret” are based. “Inside Out” goes far beyond the scope of Mr. Isherwood’s Berlin experiences during the 1930s and covers, among other things, his childhood, his boarding school and university days, his relationships with various family members and poet W.H. Auden, his immigration to the United States, his work as a writer in Hollywood and his advocacy of LGBQT rights. Author Katherine Bucknell has done an excellent job of telling the story of Isherwood’s life, even explaining to readers how some of that life's events affected, or are reflected in, his fiction. Before beginning “Inside Out,” I had never read any of Mr. Isherwood’s works. At the very least, I’ll be adding “The Berlin Stories” to my “TBR” pile. My thanks to NetGalley, author Katherine Bucknell, and publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with a complimentary ARC. The foregoing is my independent opinion.

This is a brilliant book about one of the 20th Century's greatest voices. Not only are Isherwood's works fully delineated but a complete picture of the times he lived and worked are presented in their fullness. This is biography at its best. This book is worth every penny. It is fascinating in its detail and the pages turn at an alarming rate. Beautifully crafted and full of fascinating detail.

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out is a seminal and amazing book. It is rich with family, friends, emotion, mindfulness, and the role of homosexuality in the life of Isherwood and his friends. Katherine Bucknell examines, with clarity and meticulous scrutiny, every aspect of Isherwood's life. It's indubitable that Bucknell has incorporated every source available to her to create this amazing biography, the facts made more clear by Isherwood's diaries and even those of his mother.

Isherwood's writing and analysis of his family and his place in it, and the subsequent and wonderful wealth of friends in the literary world who shore him up and incorporate his role in that world are rich and profound. As a reader, I was most astonished by the number of famous and well-known writers who were part of Isherwood's world. In particular, his friendship with W.H. Auden was a powerful and important talisman in his life. Isherwood, once he moved to the US, cultivated friendships with writers, musicians, Hollywood stars, and artists. One of the scenes that has remained with me is his visiting ailing Benjamin Britten and simply sitting with Britten, holding his hand.

Isherwood traveled frequently, and his early days living in Berlin and later writing about it are one of the most clear examinations of his search for clarity in his homosexuality. In spite of some criticism of this part of his life, he liberates himself and others by being thoroughly honest about who he is and what he stands for.

Incorporated into his life is his improbable friendship with Swami Prabhavananda, an important and decades' long relationship. Isherwood learns to meditate, become mindful, and he even assists in translating the Bhagavad Gita. His life as a Hindu convert broadens his life and perspective, and it continually shows up when he needs this connection to guide his spirituality.

This biography is long and detailed. There is something infinitely satisfying about such a book because there is nothing left out in examining Isherwood and everything that he himself studies--inside and out. Reading such a comprehensive and complete study of his life incorporates so much truth and reality that the reader feels gifted by being included in this saga.

Profuse thanks to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Net Galley for the opportunity to live with this book for some weeks. I will be thinking about it for many months.

Isherwood was a singular novelist. His Berlin novels open up to the reader a world of excess and excitement unlike anything most readers will have experienced. This record of his life is enlightening, drawing out the true man from behind this sparkling prose.