• This Sixties includes a Foreword by Christopher Hitchens.

• Christopher Isherwood is a major literary figure of the 20th century and his circle included such luminaries as W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams.

The first volume of Christopher Isherwood’s diaries starred a restless young man, an emigrant and burgeoning screenwriter. This second volume reveals a very different person and artist: As the decade dawns, Isherwood, on the cusp of his 56th birthday, has just completed his seventh novel, Down There on a Visit, and is well settled, and well connected, in Southern California. Yet like the decade itself, Isherwood’s life would be defined by turmoil, self-discovery, and transformation.

At the core of this alternately intimate and gossipy text are the two tumultuous relationships that most shaped Isherwood’s adult years: his bond with Swami Prabhavananda, his guru in Vedanta, the ancient Hindu philosophy of self-realization, and his relationship with his partner Don Bachardy, 30 years his junior. As Isherwood details the ups and downs of his own life, he paints a colorful, riveting portrait of the sixties themselves, as he muses on the advent of space travel, mini skirts, and the afro; the Kennedy-Nixon election and the Marianne Faithfull-Mick Jagger romance; the rise of the Hippies and the decline of America’s inner cities. Keenly observed and beautifully written, these diaries are an indispensible contribution to 20th-century letters, and a must-read for Isherwood fans new and old.