From award-winning author Michael Scammell comes a monumental
achievement: the first authorized biography of Arthur Koestler, one
of the most influential and controversial intellectuals of the
twentieth century. Over a decade in the making, and based on new
research and full access to its subject's papers, Koestler is the
definitive account of this fascinating and polarizing figure.
Though best known as the creator of the classic anti-Communist
novel "Darkness at Noon," Koestler is here revealed as much more-a
man whose personal life was as astonishing as his literary
accomplishments.
Koestler portrays the anguished youth of a boy raised in Budapest
by a possessive and mercurial mother and an erratic father, marked
for life by a forced operation performed without anesthesia when he
was five, growing up feeling unloved and unprotected. Here is the
young man whose experience of anti-Semitism and devotion to Zionism
provoked him to move to Palestine; the foreign correspondent who
risked his life from the North Pole to Franco's Spain, where he was
imprisoned and sentenced to death; the 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. Scammell also
provides new details of Koestler's amazing World War II adventures,
including his escape from occupied France by joining the Foreign
Legion and his bluffing his way illegally to England, where his
controversial novel Arrival and Departure, published in 1943, was
the first to portray Hitler's Final Solution.
Without sentimentality, Scammell explores Koestler's turbulent
private life: his drug use, his manic depression, the frenetic
womanizing that doomed his three marriages and led to an accusation
of rape that posthumously tainted his reputation, and his startling
suicide while fatally ill in 1983-an act shared by his healthy
third wife, Cynthia-rendered unforgettably as part of his dark and
disturbing legacy.
Featuring cameos of famous friends and colleagues including
Langston Hughes, George Orwell, and Albert Camus, Koestler gives a
full account of the author's voluminous writings, making the case
that the autobiographies and essays are fit to stand beside
"Darkness at Noon "as works of lasting literary value. Koestler
adds up to an indelible portrait of this brilliant, unpredictable,
and talented writer, once memorably described as "one third
blackguard, one third lunatic, and one third genius."
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