Christopher Isherwood Books in Order

In England after the First World War, a young artist resists his mother's expectation that he enter a conventional profession. His struggle for independence unfolds within a family shaped by class assumptions and the conflict between generations.

After the First World War, a traditional English family begins to fragment. Student Eric Vernon is torn between reverence for his father, who died in the conflict, and fascination with a surviving friend pursuing a very different life.

English teacher William Bradshaw meets Arthur Norris on a train and becomes his friend in Berlin. Norris's elaborate manners, debts, and contradictory behavior draw Bradshaw into an uncertain relationship amid the city's increasingly dangerous political atmosphere.

Blending autobiography with fiction, Isherwood traces a young writer's education through school, Cambridge, and London's artistic circles. Tutoring, secretarial work, and an unsuccessful venture into medicine become part of a search for vocation beyond conventional expectations.

These linked Berlin stories portray people living amid the city's pleasures and anxieties as the Nazis gain power. Sally Bowles, a Jewish family, and a troubled gay couple appear within an observer's account of a society approaching catastrophe.

Written with W. H. Auden, this account documents their 1938 journey through China during the war with Japan. Isherwood's travel diary joins Auden's poems in an examination of everyday encounters, wartime conditions, and their wider implications.

A young writer named Christopher Isherwood helps Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann rescue a sentimental film script in 1930s London. Studio rivalries and personal tensions collide with Bergmann's mounting distress over political violence and the prospect of European war.

Isherwood recounts a six-month South American journey undertaken with William Caskey in 1947. Traveling through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina, he records encounters with unfamiliar places and occasional acquaintances while observing the continent without tourist sentimentality.

Edited by Isherwood, this collection gathers selections published in Vedanta and the West after 1945. Essays consider Vedanta's relationship with Western history and thought, alongside questions about its relevance to Western readers and approaches to spiritual understanding.

After finding his wife with another man, Stephen Monk returns to his childhood home and reassesses his life. Memories of a lost love and his own betrayals complicate the anger that initially drove him away.

Isherwood edits a collection introducing Vedanta to Western readers through essays by religious teachers and writers including Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. Meditation, yoga, belief, and mystical experience are considered alongside questions about spiritual practice in modern life.

Four encounters in Berlin, Greece, London, and California follow different versions of a narrator named Christopher Isherwood. The men he meets illuminate contrasting ways of living, exploring the tensions among desire, isolation, spiritual aspiration, and personal fulfillment.

Isherwood recounts his movement toward Vedanta through conversations with Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley and guidance from Swami Prabhavananda. A personal account of spiritual inquiry, it acknowledges skepticism while examining the relationship between belief and his life as a writer.

After his partner's death, English professor George moves through an ordinary day in suburban California. Teaching, exercise, and social encounters expose the grief beneath his restrained behavior while offering moments of connection amid loneliness and anger.

This biography follows the Indian spiritual teacher Ramakrishna from childhood through religious striving, the arrival of his followers, and his final years. Isherwood also examines the disciples' training, presenting the teacher's life for readers unfamiliar with his tradition.

Two English brothers reunite in India as Oliver prepares to become a Hindu monk. Patrick, a married publisher with a male lover, privately doubts his brother's choices, and their letters expose tensions involving faith, sexuality, rivalry, and affection.

Drawing on his parents' lives, Isherwood recounts the relationship between Kathleen, a wine merchant's daughter, and Frank, an artistic army officer. Their courtship and marriage unfold against the social changes and imperial conflicts preceding the First World War.

Written with Don Bachardy for a television production, this adaptation revisits the scientist who creates life from dead matter. Its dramatic treatment of Frankenstein follows men and women confronting the frightening consequences of a nightmare they have helped create.

Isherwood revisits the decade after he left England for Berlin in 1929, writing openly about sexuality and the people behind his fiction. His account follows personal liberation alongside the Nazi rise and his efforts to protect his partner Heinz.

Isherwood portrays Swami Prabhavananda, the spiritual teacher who guided him for decades, while examining his own uneven religious commitment. Hollywood work, friendships, drinking, and sexual experiences sit beside fasting and discipline in a memoir of conflicting impulses.

Isherwood's journal for October 1979 is paired with Don Bachardy's portrait drawings from the same month. Encounters with figures including Joan Didion, David Hockney, and Gore Vidal bring written observation and visual portraiture into a shared record.

Eighteen illustrated nonsense poems introduce animals whose personalities reflect familiar human traits. Isherwood pairs playful verse with Sylvain Mangeot’s drawings, turning a varied menagerie into a collection of comic portraits for readers interested in imaginative poetry.

This collection brings together Isherwood's articles on mystical religion, his conversion to Vedanta, and the teachers who influenced him. Personal recollection accompanies discussion of spiritual ideas and literary concerns, connecting religious inquiry with his experience as a writer.

Written during their Cambridge years, Isherwood and Edward Upward’s stories invent a grotesque world that satirizes university dons and privileged students. Gothic situations and absurd humor reveal the experiments of two young writers challenging the society around them.

These diaries document Isherwood's search for a new life in California after emigrating in 1939. Hollywood work, wartime pacifism, literary friendships, gossip, and religious reflections reveal how daily self-examination shaped his understanding of his adopted country.

Letters to his mother capture Christopher Isherwood's final two years at Repton School. His reading, friendships, early poems and encounters with Europe reveal a young writer developing intellectually under an influential history teacher and preparing for Cambridge.

Reconstructed from letters, datebooks, and memory, this memoir revisits Isherwood's unsettled years after the Second World War. Socializing, relationships, creative inactivity, and growing anxiety emerge in an account of the period when he largely abandoned his diary.

More than a hundred letters to Isherwood's mother document his life between 1935 and 1940. This correspondence offers a view of his early writing career and personal circumstances during a period otherwise difficult to reconstruct from published accounts.

These California lectures bring together Isherwood's reflections on writing novels, scripts, and plays, alongside discussion of spirituality and his own career. His public addresses offer insight into literary craft and the experiences influencing his work.

Isherwood's diaries from 1960 through 1969 record writing projects, travel, friendships, and life with Don Bachardy. Religious commitments and everyday concerns mingle with celebrity encounters and reflections on an unsettled decade in this portrait of his continuing creative life.

The final volume of Isherwood's diaries follows his later years, combining observations on aging with literary work, friendships, and public events. His relationship with Don Bachardy and devotion to Swami Prabhavananda remain central amid changing health and circumstances.

The correspondence between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy records a relationship that lasted more than three decades. Their letters illuminate affection, separation, other attachments, and the challenges faced by a couple living openly together in Hollywood.

Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, this English Bhagavad-Gita includes an introduction by Aldous Huxley. Its treatment of knowledge, action, devotion, meditation, and renunciation introduces central Hindu teachings through the scripture's linked discussions of spiritual life.