Christopher Isherwood, born in Cheshire, England, in 1904, wrote both novels and nonfiction. He was a lifelong friend of W.H. Auden and wrote several plays with him, including Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6. He lived in Germany from 1928 until 1933 and his writings during this period described the political and social climate of pre-Hitler Germany. Isherwood immigrated to the United States in 1939 and became a U.S. citizen in 1946. He lived in California, working on film scripts and adapting plays for television. The musical Cabaret is based on several of Isherwood's stories and on his play, I Am a Camera. His other works include Mr. Norris Changes Trains, about life in Germany… in the early 1930s; Down There on a Visit, an autobiographical novel; and Where Joy Resides, published after his death in 1986.
Armistead Maupin was born in Washington D.C. on May 13, 1944. He received a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served as a naval officer in the Mediterranean and with the River Patrol Force in Vietnam. He worked as a reporter for a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, before being assigned to the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971. In 1976, he launched his groundbreaking Tales of the City serial in the San Francisco Chronicle. The series describes a group of characters that live together in a boarding house in San Francisco. Eventually, these Tales were collected into a series of six novels. In 1993, the British Broadcasting Company adapted… them for a television series that aired on PBS in 1994. His other works include Maybe the Moon, Michael Tolliver Lives, and The Days of Anna Madrigal. The Night Listener was adapted into a movie starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette.