(1905–83). Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler was interested in many fields, including philosophy and science. It is as a writer on political subjects, however, that he is best known. His involvement in the Communist party and his eventual disillusionment with the party informed much of his writing, particularly his best-known work, the novel Darkness at Noon (1940).
Arthur Koestler was born on Sept. 5, 1905, in Budapest, Hungary. After attending the University of Vienna, he took a job as a journalist. Serving as a war correspondent for the British newspaper News Chronicle during the Spanish Civil War, Koestler was imprisoned by the fascists, an experience he recounted in Spanish Testament (1937). This experience and those leading to his break with the Communist party are reflected in Darkness at Noon. Set during the period of Joseph Stalin’s purge trials of the 1930s, this penetrating novel tells the story of an old-guard Communist who at first denies but then confesses to crimes he never committed. The aging revolutionary can no longer tolerate the cruelty of the government he helped put in power. An examination of the moral danger inherent in a system that sacrifices means to an end, Darkness at Noon has been published in 30 languages. Koestler’s other novels during this period included The Gladiators (1939), a novel about the revolt against Rome led by the gladiator Spartacus, and Arrival and Departure (1943). His last political novel, The Age of Longing (1951), examines the dilemma of Europe after World War II. These books deal with similar questions of morality and political responsibility.
Koestler’s essays are collected in The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays (1945). He also contributed an essay to the collection The God That Failed (1949; ed. R. Crossman), in which he wrote of his disillusionment with Communism. Koestler recalled his early life in the memoirs Arrow in the Blue (1952) and The Invisible Writing (1954).
His later works deal with science, creativity, and mysticism. The best-known book of this period is The Act of Creation (1964), which attempts to explain the processes underlying creativity in science and art. Koestler wrote several other books concerned with science and philosophy, including The Lotus and the Robot (1960), an examination of Eastern mysticism; The Ghost in the Machine (1967), which discusses the effect of evolution on the structure of the human brain; and The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), a controversial study of the origins of the Jewish people. Bricks to Babel, a collection of his writings with new commentary by the author, appeared in 1981.
In his later years, Koestler suffered from leukemia and Parkinson’s disease. Believers in voluntary euthanasia, he and his wife Cynthia took their own lives. Koestler’s death was reported on March 3, 1983, in London.