About the Book:

HARD TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of copies are still available.

My Guru and His Disciple is a fascinating account of the author's thirty-year spiritual quest. In 1939, as Europe approaches war, Christopher Isherwood, an instinctive pacifist, travels west to California, seeking a new set of beliefs to replace the failed Leftism of the thirties. There he meets Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu priest will become his spiritual guide for the next thirty-seven years. It is also a book about the often amusing and sometimes painful tug of war between worldliness and holiness in his own life. Sexual sprees, all-night drinking sessions, a fast car ride with Greta Garbo, the glamour of writing for the Hollywood studios, intellectual sparring sessions with Berthold Brecht alternated with nights of fasting at the Vedanta Center, a six-month period of celibacy and sobriety, and the pious drudgery of translating (in collaboration with the Swami) the Bhagavad-Gita. Seldom has a single man been owed with such strong drives toward both sensuality and spirituality, abandon and discipline; out of the passionate dialectic between these drives, My Guru and His Disciple has been written.

What people say:

"My Guru and His Disciple is a sweetly modest and honest portrait of Isherwood's spiritual instructor, Swami Prabhavananda, the Hindu priest who guided Isherwood for some thirty years…. In these pages, Isherwood has reinvented the spirit of devotion for the modern reader." — New York Times Book Review

"In some ways, Isherwood's most ambitious book. There is a sense of wholeness and of the joy of spiritual quest. We can believe such a believer." — The Boston Globe

"This book is a humbling tribute to someone who revealed to Isherwood inner grounds for spiritual awareness." — New Statesman

About the Author:

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was a British-born American writer who worked in many genres, including fiction, drama, film, travel, and autobiography. He was born in Manchester, England, and lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933 and immigrated to the United States in 1939. A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, he wrote more than twenty books.