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Christopher Isherwood
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an English and American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which was the basis for Cabaret (1966); A Single Man (1964), adapted into a film directed by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".
Isherwood was the elder son of Francis Edward Bradshaw Isherwood (1869–1915), known as Frank, a professional soldier in the York and Lancaster Regiment, and Kathleen Bradshaw Isherwood, née Machell Smith (1868–1960), the only daughter of a successful wine merchant. He was the grandson of John Henry Isherwood, squire of Marple Hall and Wyberslegh Hall, Cheshire, and he included among his ancestors the Puritan judge John Bradshaw, who signed the death warrant of King Charles I and served for two years as Lord President of the Council, effectively President of the English Republic.
Isherwood's father Frank was educated at the University of Cambridge and Sandhurst Military Academy, fought in the Boer War, and was killed in the First World War.
Isherwood's mother, Kathleen, was, through her own mother, a member of the wealthy Greene brewing family of Greene King, and Isherwood was a third cousin of the novelist Graham Greene, who was also related to the brewing family.
Isherwood was born in 1904 on his family's estate in Cheshire near Stockport in the north-west of England.
His parents christened their first son Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood, which Isherwood simplified[clarification needed] on becoming a United States citizen in 1946. Christopher was enrolled at St. Edmund's school, Hindhead, Surrey beginning in 1914, where he met W. H. Auden who became a life-long friend and colleague. Isherwood left for Repton, his boarding school in Derbyshire in 1918.
At Repton, Isherwood met his lifelong friend Edward Upward, with whom he invented an imaginary English village called Mortmere, as related in his fictional autobiography, Lions and Shadows (1938). He went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, as a history scholar, but wrote jokes and limericks on his second-year academic exam and was asked to leave without a degree in 1925.
At Christmas 1925, he was reintroduced to a prep school friend, W. H. Auden. Through Auden, Isherwood met the younger poet Stephen Spender, who printed Auden's first collection, Poems (1928). Upward, Isherwood, Auden, and Spender were identified as the most exciting new literary group in England in the 1930s. Auden dubbed Isherwood the novelist in what came to be known as the Auden Group or Auden Generation. With Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice, Auden and Spender later attracted the name the MacSpaunday Poets, with which Isherwood is also associated.
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Christopher Isherwood
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an English and American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which was the basis for Cabaret (1966); A Single Man (1964), adapted into a film directed by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".
Isherwood was the elder son of Francis Edward Bradshaw Isherwood (1869–1915), known as Frank, a professional soldier in the York and Lancaster Regiment, and Kathleen Bradshaw Isherwood, née Machell Smith (1868–1960), the only daughter of a successful wine merchant. He was the grandson of John Henry Isherwood, squire of Marple Hall and Wyberslegh Hall, Cheshire, and he included among his ancestors the Puritan judge John Bradshaw, who signed the death warrant of King Charles I and served for two years as Lord President of the Council, effectively President of the English Republic.
Isherwood's father Frank was educated at the University of Cambridge and Sandhurst Military Academy, fought in the Boer War, and was killed in the First World War.
Isherwood's mother, Kathleen, was, through her own mother, a member of the wealthy Greene brewing family of Greene King, and Isherwood was a third cousin of the novelist Graham Greene, who was also related to the brewing family.
Isherwood was born in 1904 on his family's estate in Cheshire near Stockport in the north-west of England.
His parents christened their first son Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood, which Isherwood simplified[clarification needed] on becoming a United States citizen in 1946. Christopher was enrolled at St. Edmund's school, Hindhead, Surrey beginning in 1914, where he met W. H. Auden who became a life-long friend and colleague. Isherwood left for Repton, his boarding school in Derbyshire in 1918.
At Repton, Isherwood met his lifelong friend Edward Upward, with whom he invented an imaginary English village called Mortmere, as related in his fictional autobiography, Lions and Shadows (1938). He went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, as a history scholar, but wrote jokes and limericks on his second-year academic exam and was asked to leave without a degree in 1925.
At Christmas 1925, he was reintroduced to a prep school friend, W. H. Auden. Through Auden, Isherwood met the younger poet Stephen Spender, who printed Auden's first collection, Poems (1928). Upward, Isherwood, Auden, and Spender were identified as the most exciting new literary group in England in the 1930s. Auden dubbed Isherwood the novelist in what came to be known as the Auden Group or Auden Generation. With Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice, Auden and Spender later attracted the name the MacSpaunday Poets, with which Isherwood is also associated.