Koestler, Arthur

Koestler, Arthur (kĕst`lər), 1905–83, English writer, b. Budapest of Hungarian parents. Koestler spent his early years in Vienna and Palestine. An influential Communist journalist in Berlin in the early 1930s, Koestler was subsequently captured by Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War; Spanish Testament (1937) relates his experiences. Released in 1937, he edited an anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet French weekly and served in the French Foreign Legion (1939–40). After the German invasion he was interned in a concentration camp, but escaped from France in 1940 and lived thereafter in England. Koestler broke with Communism as a result of the Soviet purge trials of the late 1930s. Darkness at Noon (1941), his most important novel, vividly describes the execution of an old Bolshevik for "deviationist" belief in the individual. Other significant accounts of the evil of Stalinism include The Yogi and the Commissar (1945), and a famous essay in The God That Failed (ed. by R. H. Crossman, 1951). In his later years Koestler ranged over a wide variety of subjects. His later novels include Thieves in the Night (1946), a powerful description of the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, The Age of Longing (1951), and The Call Girls: A Tragicomedy (1973). He wrote extensively on science in such works as The Lotus and the Robot (1960), The Act of Creation (1964), The Ghost in the Machine (1968), The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971), and The Roots of Coincidence (1972). Greatly concerned in later life with euthanasia and the right to die, Koestler and his wife committed a joint suicide in 1983. Koestler combined a brilliant journalistic style with an understanding of the great movements of his times and a participant's sense of commitment.

Bibliography

See his autobiography in 3 vol., Arrow in the Blue (1952), The Invisible Writing (1954), and Janus: A Summing Up (1978); biography by D. Cesarani (1999); studies by W. Mays (1973), S. Pearson (1978), and P. J. Keane (1980).

---

Koestler, Arthur

(born Sept. 5, 1905, Budapest, Hung.—found dead March 3, 1983, London, Eng.) Hungarian-British novelist, journalist, and critic. He is best known for Darkness at Noon (1940); a political novel examining the moral danger in a totalitarian system that sacrifices means to an end, it reflects the events leading to his break with the Communist Party and his experience as a correspondent imprisoned by the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He also wrote of his break with the party in the essay collection The God That Failed (1949). His later works, mostly concerning science and philosophy, include The Act of Creation (1964) and The Ghost in the Machine (1967). Suffering from leukemia and Parkinson's disease and believing in voluntary euthanasia, he died with his wife in a suicide pact.

---

Koestler, Arthur 

Born Sept. 5, 1905, in Budapest. English writer and philosopher. Son of an industrialist.

Koestler graduated from the University of Vienna (1926) with a major in psychology. He is the author of several publicistic satirical novels, including Darkness at Noon (1940), Arrival and Departure (1943), and Thieves in the Night (1946), which have been used as anticommunist propaganda. During the 1940’s and 1950’s, Koestler was a supporter of the “cold war.” In the late 1950’s he abandoned politics and has since then published a series of essays and studies on philosophy, biology, and the theory of biological systems, including The Sleepwalkers (1959), The Act of Creation (1965), and The Ghost in the Machine (1967); these works, using the theories of modern bourgeois philosophical anthropology, develop the idea of man as a “mistake of evolution.”

WORKS

Drinkers of Infinity. London, 1968.
The Roots of Coincidence. London, 1972.

REFERENCES

Glagoleva, E. “Psevdonauchnye rassuzhdeniia o prirode tvorchestva.” Kommunist, 1972, no. 12.
Potter, D. “The Ominous Beat of Koestler’s Ragged Black Wings.” The Times Saturday Review, Oct. 21, 1967.
Europäische Begegnung, October 1970, p. 37.

E. N. GLAGOLEVA and A. V. POTEMKIN