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Best known as a novelist and author of the classic Darkness at Noon, as well as notable essays (`The Yogi' and `The Commissar'), autobiographies (Arrow in the Blue, The Invisible Writing), and scientific works (The Act of Creation, The Ghost in the Machine), Koestler was one of the most fascinating and controversial intellectuals of his day, involved in and commenting on many seminal events of the twentieth century. Born in Budapest and educated in Vienna, he moved to Palestine in the 1920s as a committed Zionist; in the 1930s he joined the German Gornmunist Party and travelled to the Soviet Union; as a foreign correspondent, he was imprisoned and sentenced to death in Franco's Spain; he escaped occupied France by joining the French Foreign Legion; and in the 1940s was one of the first to warn of the atrocities of the Jewish Holocaust. Having turned against Communism, he gained international fame with his exposure of the show trials in Darkness at Noon. Koestler passionately opposed the death penalty but advocated legal euthanasia, and in his later years became fascinated with parapsychology.
Drawing on over a hundred interviews and a wealth of new sources (private diaries, unpublished letters, archives of the CIA, MI5, the French Surete, the German and Soviet Communist Parties), Michael Scammell gives a nuanced and unsentimental account of Koestler's turbulent public and private life: his drug use, manic depression, the frenetic womanizing that led to an accusation of rape, and the shocking suicide pact with his third wife in 1983. But he also makes the case for Koestler's stature as a major autobiographer and essayist as well as novelist. In doing so he creates a complex and indelible portrait of this brilliant, unpredictable and talented writer, memorably described by one MI5 interrogator as `one-third blackguard, one-third lunatic, and one-third genius'.
