Christopher Isherwood expert Katherine Bucknell on his masterpiece A Single Man and what it meant for gay liberation:

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD’S MASTERPIECE — his finest, funniest, most subtle, committed and powerful novel — is A Single Man, published in 1964. In this novel, Isherwood gives his friend Aldous Huxley an important cameo role: George, Isherwood’s professor character, teaches Huxley’s 1939 novel After Many a Summer to his American undergraduates. Why did Isherwood choose to include Huxley’s novel? Because he wanted to introduce into A Single Man the Hindu philosophy of non-attachment that he had shared with Huxley since 1939, and to call upon the qualities of dispassionate engagement evident throughout Huxley’s life as a public intellectual in order to establish the tone for a debate about a then taboo and, for many, disgusting and destabilizing subject, the predicament of homosexuals.