The Sixties: Diaries 1960-1969

“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.

This remarkable second volume of Christopher Isherwood’s diaries opens on his fifty-sixth birthday, as the fifties give way to the decade of social and sexual revolution. These pages are crammed with wicked gossip and probing psychological insights about the cultural icons of the time—Francis Bacon, Richard Burton, David Hockney, Mick Jagger, W. Somerset Maugham, Vanessa Redgrave, David O. Selznick, Igor Stravinsky, Gore Vidal, and many others—yet prove most revealing about the author himself. Isherwood moves easily from Beckett to Brando, from arthritis to aggression, from Tennessee Williams to foot powder, while referencing the political and historical events of the period: the anxieties of the Cold War, Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight, the eruption of violence in America’s inner cities, the Vietnam War, the moon landing, and the Summer of Love. In his unparalleled chronicle, The Sixties, Christopher Isherwood turns his observant, unerring eye on the decade that, more than any other, has shaped the way we live now.

“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