Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) authored one of the 20th century's great political novels, Darkness at Noon, as well as a number of other fictional works and essay collections which explained the ethos of Communism to the West.

The son of a successful businessman and a mother who despised everything Hungarian, Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest on September 5, 1905. Thanks to his mother's insistence on speaking German and a series of German, French, and English governesses, he was rather fluent in four languages by the time he was ten.

He attended the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, where he became an ardent Zionist. In 1925, the year after his father's business failed, he ran away to Palestine, where he worked as a laborer in a commune, an advertising salesman for a Hebrew newspaper in Haifa, an assistant to an architect, a lemonade vendor, and an aide to a land surveyor. After a...