Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (FSG Classics) - Softcover

Isherwood, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374535302 ISBN 13: 9780374535308

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015

Synopsis

Lions and Shadows blends autobiography and fiction to describe the true education of a writer evolving from precocious schoolboy to dropoutatlarge in London’s bohemia of the 1920s. Forced to withdraw from Cambridge University, “Christopher Isherwood” works as a tutor to the privileged, serves as the secretary to a busy string quartet, ill-fatedly attends medical school. Licensed by names he invents, he works up extravagant portraits of his brilliant contemporaries W. H. Auden, Edward Upward, and Stephen Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion changed the literary identity of England in the 1930s.

Although the story is Isherwood’s own life story, carrying him up to the age of twenty-five, he gives free rein to his remarkable powers of dramatization, improving on the facts here and there, to make a highly entertaining, sometimes hilarious book.

“Read it as a novel,” says Isherwood. There is no difficulty taking his advice. But his characters were real people, and when Lions and Shadows was first published, in 1938, it transformed their lives into legend.

About this title

About the Author:

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was born in Manchester, England, and lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933 and immigrated to the United States in 1939. A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, he wrote more than twenty books. FSG Classics presents some of his finest work, including the novels Prater Violet, A Single Man, and A Meeting by the River; the semi-autobiographical Lions and Shadows; and the memoir Christopher and His Kind.

From Library Journal:

Isherwood released this first of several autobiographical writings at the ripe old age of 34. In it he chronicles his life at Cambridge, where, though technically a medical student, he began his writing career. Isherwood knew many of the upcoming writers of the 1920s, so this includes his observations on W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and others.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0374535302
• ISBN 13: 9780374535308
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320