My Guru and His Disciple
  • Published: 23 May 2013
  • ISBN: 9781446476178
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
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My Guru and His Disciple

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Paperback
1 Aug 2013
EBook
23 May 2013
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First published in 1980, Isherwood’s overlooked last book is central to an understanding of his life and work.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOW

In 1939, as Europe approaches war, Isherwood, an instinctive pacifist, travels west to California, seeking a new set of beliefs to replace the failed Leftism of the thirties. There he meets Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk, who will become his spiritual guide for the next thirty-seven years. Late-night drinking sessions, free love, and the glamour of writing for the Hollywood studios alternate with meditation, abstinence and the study of religious texts in a compelling tug of war between worldliness and holiness.
  • Published: 23 May 2013
  • ISBN: 9781446476178
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing his first novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial. Between 1929 and 1939 he lived mainly abroad, spending four years in Berlin and writing the novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based. He moved to America in 1939, becoming a US citizen in 1946, and wrote another five novels, including Down There on a Visit and A Single Man, a travel book about South America and a biography of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. In the late 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works: Kathleen and Frank, Christopher and His Kind, My Guru and His Disciple and October, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.

portrait photo of Christopher Isherwood

Also by Christopher Isherwood

Goodbye to Berlin
A Single Man
The Animals
The Condor and the Cows
Kathleen and Frank
Lions and Shadows
Down There on a Visit
See all

Praise for My Guru and His Disciple

A masterpiece of spiritual memoir

Los Angeles Times

Isherwood has reinvented the spirit of devotion for the modern reader. If I had to propose a candidate for canonization, Isherwood - wry, self-conscious, scrupulously honest - would get my vote

Edmund White, New York Times

The sacred and the profane collide like never before

Giles Foden, Conde Nast Traveller

What emerges is a record of a religious adventure that would have delighted Kierkegaard... Isherwood rejects conventional piety - all the humdrum apparatus of worship - in favor of a direct, even jaunty appreciation of how preposterous, certainly precarious, spirituality can be today.

New York Times