A captivating new biography of the man whose writings made him famous in 1930s Berlin. From the editor of Isherwood's diaries and letters. Christopher Isherwood rejected the life he was born into and decided to forge a different path. Heir to an English estate, he failed university, moved to Berlin, traveled across Europe with the Nazis, and journeyed around the world before settling in Hollywood. There, he adopted a new religion and continued to form friendships—including an incredible number of romantic and sexual relationships, often with other famous artists—through which he discovered himself. Isherwood repeatedly mythologized his friends and himself—from the detached "Christopher Isherwood" of Goodbye to Berlin to George, the unwavering middle-aged admirer of men, in A Single Man, and the boldly open narrator of Christopher and His Kind. He was determined to portray his environment attractively for the audience with clear, entertaining, often humorous prose. His honesty about his sexuality, political beliefs, and religion made him both a leader on the left and a target of the right. However, among many public, constructed identities, an inner "self" remained hidden. Using a wealth of unpublished material, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out reveals the drama and complexity of Isherwood's inner world. It explains how the traumas of his father’s death in World War I and his failure to protect his German lover from the Nazis were healed through his life as a monk in the 1940s, allowing him to genuinely engage in a sex-positive relationship in the 1950s, and to publicly state himself as a "great elder" of the gay rights movement in the 1970s. With this new biography, enriched by unrestricted access to Isherwood’s partner, Don Bachardy, Katherine Bucknell demonstrates how Christopher Isherwood achieved a uniquely inspired personal life. He brought about lasting changes to our culture, both through his literary work and the way he lived. Pages: 864, Dimensions: 15.4x15.4cm