Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler was born to a family of Jewish Hungarians who were moderately well-off. He attended the University of Vienna and subsequently became a journalist, reporting in the Middle East, Paris, and Berlin, among other places. At the end of 1931, he applied for membership in the Communist Party of Germany. During the Spanish Civil War, when he went to Spain as a Soviet agent, Koestler was arrested and spent time in prison. He slowly became disillusioned with communism as a result of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1938 and the revelation of the Moscow show trials. The latter in particular led to his writing of Darkness at Noon. In 1939, while he was writing the novel and living in Paris with his lover Daphne Hardy, Koestler was arrested on suspicion of working for the Soviets and was sent to an internment camp. He fled to England, joining the French Foreign Legion to escape arrest, and eventually became a British citizen in 1948. For the rest of his life, he continued publishing novels, memoirs, and critical works. The essays collected in The Yogi and the Commissar (1945) and The God that Failed (1949) explore his disillusionment with Communism. Eventually, Koestler would become especially interested in creativity, mysticism, and their relationship with science. At the end of his life he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He was a vocal supporter of voluntary euthanasia, and in 1983 he and his third wife Cynthia killed themselves by overdosing on pills.