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=== Life in the United States === {{multiple image | align = right | direction = horizontal | image1 = Isherwood and Auden by Carl van Vechten, 1939.jpg | width1 = 190 | caption1 = Isherwood (left) and [[W. H. Auden]] (right), photographed by [[Carl Van Vechten]], 1939 | image2 = Bachardy, Donald (1934-viv.) - 1954 foto Van Vechten.jpg | width2 = 170 | caption2 = [[Don Bachardy]] at age 19 (1954), photographed by [[Carl Van Vechten]] }} While living in Hollywood, California, Isherwood befriended [[Truman Capote]], an up-and-coming young writer who would be influenced by Isherwood's ''Berlin Stories'', most specifically in the traces of the story "Sally Bowles" that surface in Capote's famed novella ''[[Breakfast at Tiffany's (novella)|Breakfast at Tiffany's]]''.<ref>{{cite web | title=Year with Short Novels: Breakfast at Sally Bowles' | url=http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/short-novels-breakfast-at-sally-bowles/ | magazine=[[Open Letters Monthly]] | date=1 July 2010 | access-date=12 November 2012 | author=Norton, Ingrid | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110819185024/http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/short-novels-breakfast-at-sally-bowles/ | archive-date=19 August 2011 }}</ref> Isherwood also befriended [[Dodie Smith]], a British novelist and playwright who had also moved to California, and who became one of the few people to whom Isherwood showed his work in progress.<ref name="test">[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/40481 "Smith [married name Beesley], Dorothy Gladys [Dodie] (1896β1990)"], ''[[Oxford Dictionary of National Biography]]''. Retrieved 3 March 2014.</ref> Isherwood considered becoming an American citizen in 1945 but balked at taking an oath that included the statement that he would defend the country. The next year he applied for citizenship and answered questions honestly, saying he would accept [[non-combatant]] duties like loading ships with food. The fact that he had volunteered for service with the [[Medical corps|Medical Corps]] also helped. At the naturalisation ceremony, he found he was required to swear to defend the nation and decided to take the oath since he had already stated his objections and reservations. He became an American citizen on 8 November 1946.<ref>Bucknell (ed.), pp. 40, 77β8.</ref> He began living with the photographer William "Bill" Caskey. In 1947, the two traveled to South America. Isherwood wrote the prose and Caskey took the photographs for a 1949 book about their journey entitled ''The Condor and the Cows''. In a 1949 letter to [[Gore Vidal]], Isherwood discussed gay relationships like his own:<ref name="ibson">{{cite book |last1=Ibson |first1=John |title=Men without Maps: Some Gay Males of the Generation before Stonewall |date=22 October 2019 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=978-0-226-65611-3 |page=13 |language=en}}</ref> {{blockquote|Homosexual relationships can be and frequently are happy. Many men live together for years and share their lives and their work, just as heterosexuals do. This truth is particularly disturbing and shocking even to βliberal people,β because it cuts across the romantic, tragic notion of homosexual fate.}}
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