A Single Man is a novel by English-American author Christopher Isherwood written in 1964. The novel is set in Southern California during 1962 and tells the story of George, a British professor working at a university in Los Angeles. George is middle-aged and emotionally remote, still mourning the loss of his lover one year previously. George plans on killing himself but over the course of the day comes into contact with a number of people who gradually change the way he feels about the world, and his perception of it. The novel also deals with many difficult topics, the chief of which is homosexuality and the way in which homosexuals were made to hide their identity and their sexual orientation, especially in the Britain that George grew up in where he could have been arrested and imprisoned just for being gay. For this reason he is emotionally isolated, another theme that is explored in the novel.
Christopher Isherwood was an English-American novelist who passed away at the age of eighty-two in 1986. He is best known for The Berlin Stories, heavily influenced by both the time he spent in pre-war Germany, which became the inspiration for the classic Bob Fosse film Cabaret. Isherwood relocated to Santa Monica on middle age; it is thought that the Los Angeles university where George is a professor is based on UCLA where he both studied and taught.
Isherwood was profoundly influential when it came to other writers, The Berlin Stories influencing Truman Capote's Breakfast At Tiffany's, and also influencing Aldous Huxley to the point that Huxley began consulting with the same Seami that Isherwood consulted with and collaborating with Isherwood on a translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Another surprising friend was Dodie Smith, another English transplant and author of 101 Dalmatians.
A Single Man was one of Isherwood's more successfully adapted novels, becoming a movie in 2009; this version was directed by Gucci fashion designer Tom Ford and starring Colin Firth .
