Arthur Koestler

Born in 1905 in Budapest to a Hungarian father and Viennese mother, Koestler grew up amid the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and never quite belonged to any single country. He studied engineering and science in Vienna, dropped out before finishing, and drifted into journalism, becoming a foreign correspondent who reported from the Middle East, Paris, and Berlin. In 1931 he joined the Communist Party, convinced it offered the only answer to fascism, and during the Spanish Civil War was captured by Franco's forces and sentenced to death, spending three months in a Seville prison expecting execution each dawn. That experience broke his faith in ideology. Darkness at Noon (1940), his masterpiece, written in German and translated into English from a manuscript the original of which was lost for decades, dramatized the Moscow show trials through the confession of an old Bolshevik and became the most devastating fictional indictment of totalitarianism ever published. The God That Failed (1949) collected his essay alongside those of other disillusioned ex-Communists. He turned restlessly to science, philosophy, and psychology, producing The Sleepwalkers (1959) and The Act of Creation (1964). On March 1, 1983, suffering from Parkinson's disease and leukemia, Koestler took his own life in London alongside his wife Cynthia, a final act of control that provoked as much controversy as his writing ever had.