Darkness at Noon | Author Biography

Koestler was born on September 5, 1905, in Budapest, Hungary. His father owned a textile business until it failed during World War I at which time Koestler and his family moved to Vienna, Austria. While studying physics and engineering at the University of Vienna, Koestler became interested in the Zionist movement, which stresses that Jews should rule Palestine (modern day Israel). He moved to a Jewish settlement in Palestine in 1926 and began a career in journalism, but after three years, he lost his faith in Zionism and transferred to Paris and then to Berlin, where he became a member of the Communist Party in 1932.

Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler

In 1932 and 1933, while working for a newspaper, Koestler traveled through the USSR, where he witnessed extreme poverty and met famous politicians Karl Radek and Nicolai Bukharin. These former intellectuals of the Bolshevik Revolution, who were later executed by the Soviet government, made a deep impression on Koestler and formed the basis for the main character of his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, his most famous book. In 1936, Koestler traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish civil war, during which time he was arrested as a spy and sentenced to death until British officials successfully lobbied for his release. In England, Koestler wrote The Spanish Testament (1937), and after Bukharin and Radek were executed (in 1938 and 1939, respectively), Koestler resigned from the Communist Party.

Koestler was briefly imprisoned during the German occupation of France but was released in 1940 and eventually made his way to Britain. After the war, he began to be celebrated as a novelist, and he revived his interest in Zionism, campaigning for the creation of a Jewish state. He also was involved with the opposition to the Communist Party and campaigned against the death penalty.

Koestler continued to write political novels and journalism, as well as participating in European and American leftist intellectual debate, until the mid-1950s, when his interests turned to science and spiritualism. He wrote and spoke about the social and physical sciences during the 1960s and 1970s, although he was increasingly influenced by theological ideas, and published popular books, such as The Act of Creation (1962), which is a study of the creative process. In 1977, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and he and his third wife committed joint suicide on March 3, 1983, in London.