Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983) is the British author of several conservative books, including The Act of Creation. He is best known as the author of the classic anti-Communist novel Darkness at Noon (1940). He was a contributor to The God that Failed, in which ex-Communists tell their stories.

Unloved as a child in Budapest, Hungary, his experience of anti-Semitism and devotion to Zionism provoked him to move to Palestine. He became a famed foreign correspondent who reported from the North Pole to Franco’s Spain, where he was imprisoned and sentenced to death. He was for a while a committed Communist for whom the brutal truth of Stalin’s show trials inspired the superb and angry novel that became an instant classic in 1940.

His World War II adventures included escape from occupied France by joining the Foreign Legion and his bluffing his way illegally to England, where his controversial novel Arrival and Departure (1943) was the first to portray Hitler’s Holocaust.

## External links[edit]

* http://www.litweb.net/biography/362/Arthur_Koestler.html
* http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Arthur_Koestler/
* http://www.bookrags.com/biography/arthur-koestler/

## Further reading[edit]

* Scammell, Michael. Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (2009) 720 pages