“Intimate and compulsively readable.” —Alfred Corn, The Nation The second volume of acclaimed author Christopher Isherwood’s diaries takes readers to the heart of the 1960s, the decade in which Isherwood’s semiautobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin would be adapted into the Tony Award-winning musical Cabaret . Against a background of cultural paradigm shifts including the advent of space travel, pop art, and mod fashion, and seminal events like the Kennedy/Nixon election, the Marianne Faithfull/Mick Jagger romance, the rise of the Hippie movement, and the riotous explosion of America’s inner cities, The Sixties follows Isherwood’s friendships with creative powerhouses such as Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Richard Burton, and Gore Vidal, and continues the saga of his great romance with portraitist Don Bachardy. “The diary entries in The Sixties are a mix of quotidian detail, social observation, moody reverie, gossip and self-rebuke.” - Wall Street Journal “Gossipy, funny, wide-ranging, and revealing…[Isherwood] comes across as approachable, aware, and passionately interested.” - Publishers Weekly “ The Sixties [is] accessible to everyone. . . . A true piece of social history. In these pages you can discover so much―about the Anglo-American community in Los Angeles, about the movies and how they get written, about the emergence of the gay literary movement, about a tormented but eventually triumphant love―and you even get to read a lot of good gossip and scurrilous jokes.” - Edmund White, New York Times Book Review “An intimate portrait of the life of a beautiful if neurotic mind… streaked with gossip, flinty observations, great good humor and―despite Isherwood’s fundamental discretion―plenty of frank talk.” - Dwight Garner, New York Times “A good writer…intensely self-aware…a fascinating companion…THE SIXTIES [is] accessible to everyone…a true piece of social history.” - Edmund White, New York Times Book Review “These diaries are, in their core, a love story, set against a timeline roughly from the Berlin Crisis to the moon landing. While the world changes around them, Isherwood and Bachardy find constancy in each other. And, thanks to the deft record of these diaries, we bear witness to it all―and are all the richer for it.” - New York Journal of Books “These diaries are, in their core, a love story…thanks to [them], we bear witness to it all―and are all the richer for it.” - New York Journal of Books This second volume of Christopher Isherwood's remarkable diaries opens on his fifty-sixth birthday, as the fifties give way to the decade of social and sexual revolution. Isherwood takes the reader from the bohemian sunshine of Southern California to a London finally swinging free of post-war gloom, to the racy cosmopolitanism of New York and to the raw Australian outback. He charts his ongoing quest for spiritual certainty under the guidance of his Hindu guru, and he reveals in reckless detail the emotional drama of his love for the American painter Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior and struggling to establish his own artistic identity. The diaries are crammed with wicked gossip and probing psychological insights about the cultural icons of the time—Francis Bacon, Richard Burton, Leslie Caron, Marianne Faithfull, David Hockney, Mick Jagger, Hope Lange, W. Somerset Maugham, John Osborne, Vanessa Redgrave, Tony Richardson, David O. Selznick, Igor Stravinsky, Gore Vidal, and many others. But the diaries are most revealing about Isherwood himself—his fiction (including A Single Man and Down There on a Visit ), his film writing, his college teaching, and his affairs of the heart. He moves easily from Beckett to Brando, from arthritis to aggression, from Tennessee Williams to foot powder, from the opening of Cabaret on Broadway (which he skipped) to a close analysis of Gide. In the background run references to the political and historical events of the period: the anxieties of the Cold War, Yuri Gagarin's spaceflight, de Gaulle and Algeria, the eruption of violence in America's inner cities, the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, the moon landing, and the raising and lowering of hemlines. Isherwood is well known for his prophetic portraits of a morally bankrupt Europe on the eve of World War II; in this unparalleled chronicle, The Sixties , he turns his fearless eye on the decade that more than any other has shaped the way we live now. Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) was one of the most prominent writers of his generation. He is the author of many works of fiction, including All the Conspirators , The Memorial , Mr. Norris Changes Trains , and Goodbye to Berlin , on which the musical Cabaret was based, as well as works of nonfiction and biography. Used Book in Good Condition