What a terrific book – smart, readable, handsomely illustrated. I wish I'd had it on my desk when writing a recent book on related matters. Through Christopher Isherwood, Jamie Harker provides a succinct, complex portrait of mid-century figures who sought to write about gay identity and life. Marginalized though they were, they tried to operate near the center of American life by seeking a place in “middlebrow” culture. She fleshes out that story by a generous, skillful use of correspondence and other archival materials, along with the published texts she insightfully examines. She takes on a striking paradox: that many gay creative figures succeeded amid modern America's most intense antigay currents.

Like many historians, I approach literary studies suspicious that they are insufficiently historical and too bogged down in categories, and here are my reservations in this regard. “Middlebrow” seems a rigid box in which to place Isherwood – the arithmetical average of the quite varied cultural positions that he and other queer figures (think Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams) occupied. Perhaps the term applies more to culture than to Isherwood himself – “A Queer in Middlebrow Culture” might have been a better title. Yes, Isherwood and others earned the scorn of high-modernist critics, but the boundaries between high, middle, and low, if they ever existed, were badly eroded by the postwar era despite the fighting over them at the time. Harkin also uses “Cold War” as an adjective too often for too many things – above all “Cold War intellectuals” – without explaining it, leaving unclear whether it denotes a political stance, a cultural sensibility, or simply a period (others might just say “postwar”), and failing to acknowledge that a frightening Cold War did rage. And by labeling almost everything “Cold War” – or its presumed antithesis – she largely erases World War II from her story even though it was a formative period for her subjects (Isherwood arrived in the United States in 1939, not 1945), and even though the war figured in much fiction they wrote. It is a curious but stubborn erasure in scholarly work that I often complain about.

But we learn so much about how queer writers navigated their era's cultural and political currents – an especially tricky task for Isherwood, British before he became American. He carried a reputational baggage that younger American writers lacked, possessed a voice developed in a different culture, sought a place in an American landscape and idiom he did not immediately grasp, chased both literary renown and Hollywood screenwriting credits, and pursued “an American authorial identity in a culture with an obsessive fear of perverse sexuality, foreign influences, and accessible writing” (6). And he did so amid a tide of fiction offering tragic fates for queer characters, leading him to write Vidal, “Homosexual relationships can be and frequently are happy” (24). California proved the apt setting for Isherwood to encounter the mishmash of cultural currents and aspirations he pursued. We learn how extensively queer artists engaged each other, how much publishers tried to push (and exploit) their work, how generously Isherwood engaged the numerous readers who wrote him (“he identified as much with them as they with him” (70)), and how cleverly he dealt with queer themes, an effort capped by his novel A Single Man (1964). By then, given the decade's “ethos of experimentation and rebellion,” Isherwood's presumed “flaws” had become “virtues” (71). By then, too, his engagement with gay pornographic fiction was in full force.

Harkin writes Isherwood back into the center of American cultural life from which modernist critics and subsequent experts excluded him. Perhaps the critical scorn that he and others endured, far from blocking them, provided a force to work against and a protective cover: because they were not taken too seriously, they could write what they wanted to, albeit with the hedging that their times seemed to require. Homophobia and queer assertiveness were not so much opposites as reciprocal streams of cultural work.

As in other recent scholarship, the Stonewall Rebellion fades in historical perspective as the singular moment when gay liberation began. True, much changed after 1969. Isherwood was happy he was no longer “living under a heterosexual dictatorship,” as he put it (166), publicly assertive about his queer identity when earlier he had been so coy, and the rare creative queer of his generation to navigate the sensibilities of a post-Stonewall generation that often rebuked everyone before it as “closeted.” Harkin has too sharp an eye for continuity to leave it at that. “Apparently, this brave new world of gay liberation still had a remarkable number of continuities with the ‘bad old days,’ at least when it came to gay content” (171). She nails that claim, and many others.