The Lost Years

Christopher Isherwood settled in California in 1939 and spent the war years working in Hollywood studios and teaching English to European refugees. When the war ended he careered into a life of frantic socialising, increasing dissipation, anxiety and despair. For nearly half a decade he all but ceased to write fiction and he abandoned his lifelong habit of keeping a diary.This is Isherwood's account, reconstructed nearly thirty years later, of his day-to-day experiences in London, New York and Santa Monica. Begun in 1971, in a post-sixties atmosphere of liberation, Lost Years includes explicit details of his romantic and sexual relationships during the 1940s and unveils a hidden and sometimes shocking way of life, shared with friends, acquaintances and colleagues - many of whom were themselves well-known writers, artists, actors and filmmakers.Isherwood never prepared Lost Years for publication because he rapidly became caught up in writing the bestselling book which established him as a hero of gay liberation, Christopher and His Kind. Lost Years shows Isherwood both as a private being trying to make sense of the events of his life and as social chronicler, portraying the energy and, occasionally, abandon of the post-war years.