Christopher Isherwood may be the most self-absorbed of contemporary writers. As Angus Wilson has observed, "His fictional life is one of the important Anglo-Saxon literary legends of our time and everything that he writes relates to that legend." He sometimes appears to be a face looking over his own shoulder, monitoring with a curious objectivity his fascinating journey from angry young man to ironic moralist and gay-liberation activist. "With me," he has acknowledged, "everything starts with autobiography." But his novels and autobiographies are never self-indulgent. They confront universal questions of alienation and isolation, of sexuality and spirituality, of maturity and transcendence. Born of scrupulous introspection and expressed in carefully crafted, seemingly artless prose, his vision illuminates the human conflicts of our time. Described by Gore Vidal as "the best prose writer in English," he is a master of narrative technique and an incisive interpreter of character. Comparing Isherwood...