Christopher Isherwood went to Berlin in 1929 because it was the one city in Europe where a gay man could live openly. He stayed four years. The novels he wrote about that period, particularly Goodbye to Berlin, captured the cabaret decadence and creeping political dread of Weimar's final days with a deceptive simplicity that made the horror feel domestic. Sally Bowles, his most famous character, a brash, self-destructive English singer performing in seedy nightclubs, became the basis for the musical Cabaret and the 1972 film starring Liza Minnelli. Isherwood was born in Cheshire in 1904 to an upper-middle-class family. He met W. H. Auden at school; they became lovers, collaborators, and lifelong friends. He studied medicine at King's College London and dropped out. He studied at Cambridge and dropped out. Berlin was where he found his subject: ordinary people navigating the collapse of a society around them. He left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. After brief stays in several countries, he emigrated to the United States in 1939 and eventually settled in Santa Monica, California, where he became a devoted practitioner of Vedanta Hinduism under Swami Prabhavananda. He translated the Bhagavad Gita and several Upanishads into English. His later novel A Single Man, published in 1964, depicted a day in the life of an aging gay professor mourning his dead partner. It was written with an emotional directness almost nobody else attempted at the time regarding same-sex relationships. The book was largely ignored on publication and rediscovered decades later as a masterpiece of compressed grief, eventually adapted into a 2009 film by Tom Ford. He lived with the artist Don Bachardy for 33 years, one of the most visible same-sex partnerships in mid-century America. He died on January 4, 1986, at 81. His diaries, published posthumously, run to thousands of pages and constitute one of the great literary records of twentieth-century cultural life.