Born August 26: Christopher Isherwood

Vastly underappreciated, and largely remembered for the wrong reasons, Christopher Isherwood changed the way fiction is written with his "I am a camera" style of narration. Read his interview in the Paris Review's series The Art of Fiction and make time for one of the best gay books ever, Christopher and His Kind, which is equally enthralling about literary revelations and sexual mores: Rejecting his uptight, upperclass England, Isherwood spent much of his twenties in Berlin where he dated working class teens. Falling in love with young Heinz at a time when living quarters were especially scarce, he moved into Heinz's family's one bedroom apartment; the parents moved out of their bedroom and slept in the living room so the twenty-five year-old Brit could enjoy a double bed in privacy with their fifteen year-old son. Another person he met was Jean Ross, on whom he based Sally Bowles in his The Berlin Stories, which of course became Cabaret. After moving to England and to New York with Auden, and further literary successes, Isherwood settled permanently in Los Angeles, where when he was forty-eight he met teenager Don Bachardy. They remained partners for over thirty years until Isherwood's death in 1986. Their relationship is the subject of the documentary,  Chris & Don. A Love Story. Last year Harper published another 800 pages of his diaries, covering one decade, The Sixties.