In 1939 Christopher Isherwood & W.H. Auden emigrated together to the United States. In spare luminous prose these diaries describe Isherwoods search for a new life in California; his work as a screenwriter in Hollywood his pacifism during World War II & his friendships with such gifted artists & intellectuals as Garbo Chaplin Thomas Mann Charles Laughton Gielgud Olivier Richard Burton & Aldous Huxley. Throughout this period Isherwood continued to write novels & sustain his literary friendships
- with E.M. Forster Somerset Maugham Tennessee Williams & others. He turned to his diaries several times a week to record jokes & gossip observations about his adopted country philosophy & mystical insights. His devotion to his diary was a way of accounting for himself; he used it as both a discipline & a release.