“A slip of a wild boy: with quick silver eyes,” as Virginia Woolf saw him in the 1930s, Christopher Isherwood journeyed and changed with his century, until, by the 1980s, he was celebrated as the finest prose writer in English and the Grand Old Man of Gay Liberation. In this final volume of his diaries, capstone of a million-word masterwork, he greets advancing age with poignant humor and an unquenchable appetite for the new; aches, illnesses, and diminishing powers are clues to a predicament still unfathomed. The mainstays of his mature contentment–his Hindu guru, Swami Prabhavananda, and his long term companion, Don Bachardy–draw from him an unexpected high tide of joy and love.

Around his private religious and domestic routines orbit gifted friends both anonymous and infamous. Bachardy’s burgeoning career pulled Isherwood into the 1970s art scene, where we meet Rauschenberg, Ruscha, and Warhol as well as Hockney (adored) and Kitaj. Collaborating with Bachardy on scripts for their prize-winning Frankenstein and their Broadway fiasco, A Meeting by the River, extended ties in Hollywood and the theater world. John Huston, Merchant and Ivory, John Travolta, John Voight, Elton John, David Bowie, Joan Didion, and Armistead Maupin each take a turn through Isherwood’s densely populated human comedy.

These are the most concrete and the most mysterious of his diaries, candidly revealing the fear of death that crowded in past Isherwood’s fame, and showing how his life-long immersion in the day-to-day lifted him, paradoxically, toward transcendence.

“…compulsively readable…a testament to his connections to the literati and Hollywood glitterati…meticulous notes and annotations by editor Bucknell distinguish this fitting finale to a fascinating life.” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“For gay readers this is not only essential literature from a closeted time, but part of an unbroken chronicle of the gay subcultures in England, Europe and the U.S.” Lew Whittington, THE HUFFINGTON POST
“…the gold mine of Isherwood work has been the posthumous publication of three huge diaries amounting to almost 3,000 pages. Comprehensively and lovingly edited and annotated by Katherine Bucknell…” Michael Bronski, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE