Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood (August 26, 1904 - January 4, 1986), Anglo-American novelist, was born at Disley, Cheshire in the north west of England. The son of landed gentry, his army officer father was killed in the First World War.
At school he met W. H. Auden who became his lifelong friend. Rejecting his upper-class background and attracted to boys, he relocated to Weimer Berlin, drawn by its reputation for sexual freedom. He worked as private tutor while writing the novel 'Mr. Norris Changes Trains and a series of short stories collected under the title Goodbye to Berlin. These provided the inspiration for the play I Am A Camera and subsequently the musical Cabaret''.
Auden and Isherwood emigrated first to China, then to California where he embraced Hinduism. Together with Prabhavananda he produced several Hindu scriptural translations, Vedanta essays, the biography Ramakrishna and his Followers, and novels, plays and screenplays, all imbued with themes and characters of Vedanta, karma, reincarnation and the Upanishadic quest.
Arriving in Hollywood in 1939, his first met George Heard, the mystic-historian who founded his own monastery at Trubaco Canyon that was eventually gifted to the Vedanta Society. Through Heard, who was the first to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta, Isherwood joined an extraordinary band of mystic explorers that included Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Chris Wood, John Yale and Jiddu Krishnamurti. Through Huxley, Isherwood befriended the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.
Isherwood died in Santa Monica, California.
