Christopher Isherwood rejected the English life he was born to, heir to the family estate, and set out to make another life, as a gay man and a writer. He deliberately flunked out of university, was driven from Berlin by the Nazis, wandered Europe, circled the globe, then settled in Hollywood before World War Two to write for the movie studios. There he adopted a new religion, Vedanta, and continued to form the myriad close friendships, including an astounding number of romantic and sexual ones, through which he discovered and rediscovered himself from childhood onward.

He used himself as a character in his writing, varying name and persona – the credulous William Bradshaw in Mr. Norris Changes Trains, the detached Christopher Isherwood narrator of Goodbye to Berlin, the exuberant self-mocker in Lions and Shadows, the ambitious student screen writer of Prater Violet, the sceptical outsider of Down There on a Visit, the unapologetic middle-aged lover of younger men, George, in A Single Man, the boldly out narrator of Christopher and His Kind, the acute examiner of self and others in the Diaries.

Isherwood’s openness—about his pacifism, his homosexuality, his religion—made him a figurehead for the left and a target for the right. He continually recalibrated his writing in response, determined to make himself and his milieu appealing to mainstream audiences. I Am a Camera and Cabaret, based on his Berlin writings, established him as a household name. Yet among his many constructed selves, he remained hidden.

Using a wealth of unpublished material, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out reveals for the first time his rich interior world, well-spring of his shape-changing quest for an authentic self—from the repressed trauma over his father’s death in 1915, to his secret resolve in the 1920s not to submit to martyrdom like Oscar Wilde, his excruciating inability in the 1930s to protect his German lover from the Nazis, his life as a monk in the 1940s, his unflinching commitment to a sexually open relationship with a lover thirty years his junior in the 1950s and 60s, his explicit public avowal of his homosexuality when he came out as a 'grand old man' of the gay rights movement in the 1970s.

Fascinating to other artists—including Virginia Woolf, Igor Stravinsky, Greta Garbo, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, David Hockney--Isherwood lived at the creative heart of the twentieth century. His multifaceted personality serves as a prism through which we may view that century. With this new biography, authorized by Isherwood’s life partner Don Bachardy, Katherine Bucknell shows how Christopher Isherwood achieved a uniquely rewarding, inspiring personal life and, by presenting it lightly, lucidly, comically in his work, forever changed literature and the wider culture.