How may possibly one write approximately homosexual existence for the mainstream public in chilly struggle the USA? Many midcentury homosexual American writers, hampered by way of exterior and inner censors, by no means controlled to do it. yet Christopher Isherwood did, and what makes his accomplishment extra impressive is that whereas he used to be negotiating his id as a homosexual author, he used to be reinventing himself as an American one. Jaime Harker indicates that Isherwood refashioned himself as an American author following his emigration from England through immersing himself within the homosexual analyzing, writing, and publishing groups in chilly warfare the USA.

Drawing generally on Isherwood’s documents, together with manuscript drafts and unpublished correspondence with readers, publishers, and different writers, Middlebrow Queer demonstrates how Isherwood mainstreamed homosexual content material for heterosexual readers in his postwar novels whereas additionally covertly writing for homosexual audiences and inspiring a symbiotic dating among author and reader. The result—in such novels as The international within the night, Down There on a trip, A unmarried guy, and a gathering by means of the River—was a fancy, layered kind of writing that Harker calls “middlebrow camp,” a style that prolonged the bounds of either homosexual and middlebrow fiction.

Weaving jointly biography, heritage, and literary feedback, Middlebrow Queer strains the continual evolution of Isherwood’s at the same time queer and American postwar authorial identification. In doing so, the ebook illuminates many facets of chilly struggle America’s homosexual print cultures, from homosexual protest novels to “out” pulp fiction.