Born Aug. 26, 1904, High Lane, Cheshire, Eng. — died Jan. 4, 1986, Santa Monica, Calif., U.S. British-born U.S. writer.

Educated at Cambridge University, he became close friends with W.H. Auden, with whom he traveled and collaborated on three verse dramas, including The Ascent of F6 (1936). He lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933; his two novels about this period, later published together as The Berlin Stories (1946), inspired the play I Am a Camera (1951; film, 1955) and the musical Cabaret (1966; film, 1972). A pacifist, he moved to southern California at the beginning of World War II, where he taught and wrote screenplays. A follower of Swami Prabhavananda, he wrote and translated works on Indian Vedanta.

Goodbye to Berlin is a short novel by Christopher Isherwood. It is often published together with The Last of Mr. Norris in a collection called The Berlin Stories.

The novel, a semiautobiographical account of Isherwood's time in 1930s Berlin, describes pre-Nazi Germany and the people he met.

Moving to Germany to work on his novel, Isherwood soon becomes involved with many different German citizens: The caring landlady, Frau. Shroeder; the "divinely decadent" Sally Bowles, a young English woman who sings in the local Cabaret; Natalia Laundauer, the rich, Jewish heiress of a prosperous family business; Peter and Otto, a couple struggling to accept their relationship in light of the rise of the Nazis.

The book, first published in 1939, ironically highlights the groups of people who would be most at risk from Nazi intimidation.