In a comprehensive critical study of the literary artist, mystic, and gay-activist icon Christopher Isherwood, David Garrett Izzo draws on previously unavailable material to offer a fresh appraisal of the writer's literary milieu and his influence on twentieth-century literature and culture. The first thorough examination of Isherwood's work and life in twenty years, Izzo's analysis brings into play the Mortmere stories, by Isherwood and Edward Upward (dating from the 1920s but published only in 1994), and the Diaries, 1939-1960, published in 1996, to reposition Isherwood within a circle of British writers that included - besides Upward - W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day Lewis. Describing Isherwood as a "catalyzing influence" on the Auden generation, Izzo explores the dissemination of Isherwood's ideas through his own work and the writings of his contemporaries.