Arthur Koestler’s novel of ideas, Darkness at Noon, was originally published in England in 1940 to great acclaim. It has been called one of those books that has ceased to be a work of literature and has instead become a monument. In 1998, the editorial board of the Modern Library named it the eighth best novel of the century.
But Darkness at Noon was just one work among many others reportage, essays, autobiography, history of science and the paranormal, as well as other novels on a wide range of subjects by its author. Koestler (1905-1983) was one of the major intellectual voices on the Cold War and other issues in the English-speaking world of his time. A native of Hungary, he was a complex, controversial activist whose life and writings bore testimony to a relentless search for identity, meaning, and community.
Biographer David Cesarani painstakingly chronicles Koestler’s life, times, and writings in his Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. He points out that Koestler was the classic homeless mind: the
