The Berlin Stories is a 1945 omnibus by Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood and consisting of the novels Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The two novels are set in Jazz Age Berlin between 1930 and 1933 on the cusp of Adolf Hitler's ascent to power. Berlin is portrayed by Isherwood during this chaotic interwar period as a carnival of debauchery and despair inhabited by desperate people who are unaware of the national catastrophe that awaits them.
The cover of the first edition
Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden circa 1938.
John Van Druten adapted Isherwood's work into the 1951 Broadway play I Am a Camera.
Isherwood in 1939
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical Cabaret (1966); A Single Man (1964), adapted as a film by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".
Isherwood in 1938
Repton School
Jean Ross, a British expatriate and cabaret singer upon whom Isherwood based the character of Sally Bowles
Christopher Isherwood (left) and W. H. Auden (right), photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1939
