A Single Man was published by Simon & Schuster in 1964. George is a middle-aged Englishman teaching at a college in Santa Monica Canyon. His partner Jim has recently died in a car accident, and George is navigating the aftermath — not the dramatic grief of the first days but the grinding, quotidian loneliness that follows: waking alone, eating alone, driving to work through traffic that is indifferent to his pain, teaching students who have no idea what he has lost.
Isherwood follows George through a single day, from morning to night, with a narrative intimacy that is closer to Virginia Woolf than to the detached reportage of the Berlin stories. George showers, dresses, drives, teaches a class on Aldous Huxley, has lunch, visits a dying friend, drinks at a bar, swims with a student named Kenny, and goes to bed. The events are ordinary; the consciousness experiencing them is not. George is fully alive — alert, intelligent, capable of anger, desire, humor, and tenderness — and his aliveness makes his loneliness more, not less, acute.
The Gay Novel
A Single Man was revolutionary in 1964 — and it achieved its revolution by refusing to treat George’s homosexuality as a problem, a pathology, or a subject requiring special pleading. George’s grief for Jim is not different in kind from any other grief; his desire for human connection is not different from any other desire. Isherwood simply writes George as a human being who happens to be gay, and the effect — in a decade when homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness and was illegal in most jurisdictions — was quietly explosive.
Tom Ford’s 2009 film adaptation, starring Colin Firth, brought the novel to a new audience and confirmed its status as a masterpiece. Firth’s performance — all suppressed emotion, all controlled exterior masking interior devastation — captures George perfectly.
Collecting A Single Man
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1964): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $500–$1,500
- Very good/very good: $200–$500
- UK first edition (Methuen, 1964): $300–$800
- Signed: $1,500–$4,000