In 1939 Christopher Isherwood and W H Auden emigrated together to the United States. In spare, luminous prose these diaries describe Isherwood's search for a new life in California; his work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, his pacifism during World War II and his friendships with such gifted artists and intellectuals as Garbo, Charles Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Charles Laughton and Aldous Huxley.
As one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, Isherwood's is an exemplary twentieth-century life - assured and neurotic, fearless and fretful, generous and small-minded, forgiving and remorsefully judgemental.
