Biography Essay

Whoever would undertake the formidable task of writing the intellectual history of the twentieth century would be well advised to include in it the works of Arthur Koestler and the controversies they helped to spawn. These controversies were both bitter and continuous throughout Koestler's career because with each of his books he peeled away another layer of twentiethcentury consciousness. Many of these arguments, especially those centered on the political realities of communism were among the most heated intellectual battles of the twentieth century. In his most powerful novel, Darkness at Noon (1941), Koestler explored the psychology of an individual Marxist so thoroughly that the novel itself has become inseparable from our general understanding of Karl Marx and the Marxists. Koestler's portrait of the revolutionary personality is so sharply drawn that it must be counted among the indispensable pieces in the intellectual mosaic of modern Western man.

Arthur...