Arthur Koestler
CBE (
September 5,
1905,
Budapest –
March 3,
1983,
London) was a
Hungarian polymath who became a naturalized
British subject. He wrote
journalism,
novels,
social philosophy, and books on
scientific subjects. In 1931, he joined the
Communist Party of Germany, but left the party seven years later, after emigrating to the United Kingdom. By the late
1940s, he was one of the most recognized and outspoken British
anti-communists, and he remained politically active through the 1950s. He wrote several popular books, including Arrow in the Blue (the first volume of his autobiography), The Yogi and the Commissar (a collection of essays, many dealing with Communism),
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe, The Act of Creation, and The Thirteenth Tribe (a new theory on the origins of
Eastern European Jews). Koestler's
Magnum opus, the novel
Darkness at Noon about the
Soviet 1930s purges, ranks with
George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four as a fictional treatment of
Stalinism. He also wrote
Encyclopædia Britannica articles.
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