Novel
A Single Man
Christopher Isherwood · 1964
Synopsis
Los Angeles, a winter morning in 1962, shortly after the Cuban missile crisis and two weeks before Christmas. George, a fifty-eight-year-old Englishman, teaches literature at a state university. Jim, the man he lived with, has died in an accident; George has told the neighbours nothing, and they believe he has gone back to his parents. The book follows him over a single day: the freeway, the class, the hospital where a woman Jim had loved is dying, then the evening at his friend Charlotte's.
Context
The novel appeared in 1964 and takes place in a single day, from waking to bedtime. Elizabeth Hardwick noted that George mourns his companion there as a widower mourns his wife. Its author was then teaching at Los Angeles State College, whose campus the novel's seems to draw on, and the story is set shortly after the days of October 1962 when people believed an atomic war was coming. According to his American publisher, it was the one of his novels he preferred. Tom Ford made a film of it in 2009.
Who it is for
A short novel; translated into French by Léo Dilé in 1980, the only translation, reissued in paperback.
Prizes and reception
Edmund White regards it as one of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement.
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