Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) was a Hungarian-British writer, journalist, and intellectual. Born in Budapest, he studied electrical engineering and psychology and worked as a journalist in, among other places, Berlin, Paris, and the Soviet Union. He was a member of the Communist Party until 1938. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, he was arrested in Málaga and sentenced to death as a spy; an intervention by the British government saved his life. He emigrated to England in 1940. His best-known work is the novel *Darkness at Noon*, which became one of the most widely read novels of the postwar period. Koestler died in London in 1983.