Christopher and His Kind: 1929–1939

Originally published in 1976, Christopher and His Kind covers the most memorable ten years in the writer's life—from 1928, when Christopher Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. His friends and colleagues during this time included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E. M. Forster, as well as colorful figures he met in Germany and later fictionalized in his two Berlin novels—and who appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.

What most impressed the first readers of this memoir, however, was the candor with which he describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggles to save his companion, a German man named Heinz, from the Nazis. An engrossing and dramatic story and a fascinating glimpse into a little-known world, Christopher and His Kind remains one of Isherwood's greatest achievements.

“Indispensable for admirers of this truly masterly writer.” ―New York Times Book Review

“The best prose writer in English . . . The later Isherwood is even better than the early cameraman.” ―Gore Vidal

“Isherwood freely discusses a dimension of his experience previously repressed in his fiction, his homosexuality. And in telling the truth about himself, he ultimately transcends the limits of autobiography to write what is, in effect, another novel.” ―Washington Post