Christopher Isherwood - (1904-1986)
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San Pedro High School in San Pedro, California
I. Biography
Christopher Isherwood was born on August 26, 1904, in High Lane in Cheshire, England. He was a son of Francis Edward and Kathleen Isherwood. He had lived in many parts of world. He worked as a secretary to French violinist Andre Mangeot in London, England, 1926-27. In 1929, He went to Berlin to stay for four years as he taught English. He traveled throughout Europe, 1933-37. He also went to China with Auden in 1938.
In 1939, Isherwood immigrated to the United States. He wrote dialogues for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, CA, 1940. He worked with American Friends Service Committee in Haverford, PA and in a hostel for Central European refugees in 1941-42. In 1943-45, He worked as a co-editor with Swami Prabhabananda of the society's magazine, Vedanta and the West . He became a citizen of the United States in 1946. He had been a professor at Los Angeles State College (now California State University, Los Angeles), University of California, Santa Barbara, University of California Los Angeles, and University of California, Riverside.
Isherwood wrote many novels, plays, and screenplays. Sometimes, he also wrote comic fictions. On January 4, 1986, Isherwood died of cancer in Santa Monica, California.
II. Literary Works
The Last of Mr. Norris fictionalizes his stay in the pre-Nazi Berlin of the 1930s. It features the criminal adventures of Arthur Norris, an aging conman who befriends the naïve William Bradshaw who is the narrator of the story. Norris is irresistible to everyone he meets although a moral bankrupt.
Goodbye to Berlin fictionalizes Isherwood's life in Berlin in 1930s. In this book, the narrator is Christopher Isherwood himself. Claude J. Summers calls this book an "extraordinary achievement."
A Single Man is about a study of a middle-aged homosexual in grief over the death of his longtime companion. The novel creates a portrait of a tragic man. A single man, George, awakes at the beginning of the novel and sleeps at the end of it—a single day elapse. George is middle-aged, an Englishman, and a professor of English in California university. The novel contains one of his day: morning and his first moments of consciousness; the alien young neighbors whose attempts at friendliness merely underline his loneliness; the comic lecture on the modern Novel; the drunken dinner with a lonely Englishwoman who tempts him with a sentimental vision of England as home.
Kathleen and Frank is not a fiction. It is a remembrance of his parents. It begins with his parents' first meeting in the 1890s and proceeds until 1939. The book ends with Isherwood's evaluation of his parents' impact upon his own personal development.
Christopher and His Kind describes Isherwood's activities during 1930s.
III. Los Angeles, California and Christopher Isherwood
Camphor Tree Lane: The street that the palm stand unstirred and the oleander bushes drip moisture from their leaves.
The San Tomas State College: George works here. Its campus is back on the other side of the freeway. The little hills have been trucked away bodily or had their tops sliced off by bulldozers, and the landscape is gashed with raw terraces.
Los Angeles: One of the main cities of California. The population is so high, and many immigrants live here. The Olympics was held in 1984.
Little Good Place: The place that people can paint a bit, write a bit, and drink lots. They see themselves as rear-guard individualists.
Pasadena: One of the cities near by Los Angeles. It is mentioned in the book just once.
IV. Literary Works
All the Conspirators (1928)
The Memorial: Portrait of a Family (1932)
The Last of Mr. Norris (1935)
Sally Bowles (1937)
Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
Practer Violet (1989)
The Berlin Stories (1946)
The World in the Evening (1954)
Down There on a Visit (1962)
A Single Man (1964)
A Meeting by the River (1967)
Kathleen and Frank (1971)
V. Sources
http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/authorInfo.asp?authorCode=166626&userid= 5SI5LOJ58B&mscssid=AC5JQS7H4TS12JUQ00C0NDAQ484X48K2&pcount=0&srefer=
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374520380/qid%3D929691310/002-6512074-139 9627
Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man
. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1964 This essay was submitted by a student of Grant Farley, a teacher at San Pedro High School in San Pedro, California.