Christopher Isherwood was a British American novelist, memoirist, and playwright best known for The Berlin Diaries, a fictionalized portrayal of his experiences with the urban demimonde and the rise of Nazism in pre-Second World War Berlin. A close friend of W. H. Auden and other modernist writers, Isherwood used modernist aesthetic technique to present the destructive effects of Fascism on the ethical behavior of ordinary Germans (Spiro: 17). Isherwood's work had considerable influence on British and, after his move in 1939 to Los Angeles, American literature.