Christopher and His Kind

Christopher and His Kind

1976 edition cover
Author	Christopher Isherwood
Language	English
Genre	Autobiography
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date	1976
Pages	339
ISBN	0-8166-3863-2
OCLC	2439517

Christopher and His Kind is a memoir by Christopher Isherwood, published in 1976, in which he expounded events in his life from 1929 to 1939, including his years in Berlin which were the inspiration for his popular novel Goodbye to Berlin.

Isherwood decided late in his life that he had a moral obligation to renounce the self-censorship that marked his early novels, specifically the excision of any hint of his homosexuality. Accordingly, in Christopher and His Kind he recounts his experiences as a young gay man enticed by the liberated atmosphere of Weimar Berlin into a quest for sexual and intellectual emancipation, and argues that his homosexuality, far from a marginal private shame to be suppressed, was a central element in his human and creative development, an identity he cherished and shared with many others ("my tribe", "my kind"), with whom he felt a special kinship. This remarkably candid autobiography was, in Isherwood's view, the way to discharge the obligation he felt due to "his kind", and thus make his own contribution to the cause of gay liberation.

Screen adaptation

Christopher and His Kind, directed by Geoffrey Sax, and starring Matt Smith as Isherwood, was shown on television in 2011.

External links

• Christopher and His Kind on Open Library at the Internet Archive