| Arthur Koestler  AKA Arthur Köstler
Born: 3-Sep-1905
Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
Died: 3-Mar-1983
Location of death: London, England
Cause of death: Suicide
Gender: Male
Religion: Atheist
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Author, Journalist, Philosopher Nationality: Hungary
Executive summary: Darkness at Noon Hungarian-born writer-philosopher who focused on the disparity between reason and emotion as well as the problem of totalitarianism in the wake of the revolutions of the early 20th century.
In his critical companion to Darkness at Noon, literary critic Harold Bloom wrote:
Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940) is an eminent instance of one of my favorite sub-literary genres, the Period Piece. [...] Except for Darkness at Noon, I have only dim recollections of Koestler's novels, and rereading the story of Rubashov's martyrdom (to call it that), is certainly not an aesthetic experience. Koestler had no gift for characterization: "Rubashov" is just a name upon a page. I have no desire to break a butterfly on a wheel: Koestler achieved fame during the Cold War era, which in the first decade of the twenty-first century is now remote, if not archaic. For Koestler, Soviet Communism was the God that Failed, and he went off whoring after even stranger Gods, settling finally for the God of a weird, personal Evolutionism.
Period Pieces frequently last up to three generations, and then vanish forever. Recognizing a Period Piece as such is always a test of the literary critic, though it never renders a critic popular. An ideological, politicized age like ours is particularly vulnerable to the enshrinement of Period Pieces. Nearly everything on our current academic scene, from grade schools to graduate schools, is one more Period Piece. Since we have only an interval, and then our place knows us no more, I urge my own students to learn to avoid Period Pieces, no matter how they are praised in the media or promoted in schools.
In his book The Thirteenth Tribe, Koestler argues that the majority of European Jewry is actually descended from the Khazars, a Turkish power that existed in present-day Ukraine that in AD 740 converted to Judaism, eventually migrating westward to present-day Poland and Lithuania.
In 1980, Koestler became one of the vice presidents of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, EXIT. Suffering from Parkinson's Disease and terminal Leukemia, Koestler committed suicide via drug overdose, accompanied by his (perfectly healthy) third wife. Father: Henrik K. Koestler
Mother: Adele Jeiteles Koestler
Wife: Dorothy Asher (m. 1935, div. 1950)
Wife: Mamaine Paget (his secretary; m. 1950, div. 1952)
Wife: Cynthia Jefferies Patterson (his secretary; b. 1927, m. 1965, d. 3-Mar-1983, suicide pact with her husband)
Slept with: Simone de Beauvoir
University: Technische Hochschule Vienna (1922-6, dropout)
Sonning Prize 1968
Commander of the British Empire 1972
Naturalized UK Citizen 1945
Tonsillectomy
Suicide Attempt
Allied Internment Camp Inmate
Hungarian Ancestry
Jewish Ancestry
Risk Factors: Parkinson's
Is the subject of books:
Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations: Darkness at Noon, 2004, BY: Harold Bloom, ed., DETAILS: nonfiction
Author of books:
Spanish Testament (1937, novel)
The Gladiators (1939, novel)
Darkness at Noon (1940, novel)
The Scum of the Earth (1941, novel, written in English)
Dialogue with Death (1942, novel, abridgement of Spanish Testament)
Arrival and Departure (1943, novel)
Twilight Bar (1945, novel)
The Yogi and the Commissar (1945, essays)
Thieves in the Night (1946, novel)
The Challenge of Our Time (1948, anthology of essays, by Koestler, E. M. Forster, et al.)
Insight and Outlook: An Inquiry into the Common Foundations of Science, Art and Social Ethics (1949, nonfiction)
Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine 1917-1949 (1949, nonfiction)
The God that Failed (1950, nonfiction, ed. R.H.S. Crossman)
The Age of Longing (1951)
Arrow in the Blue (1952, autobiography, volume 1)
The Invisible Writing (1954, autobiography, volume 2)
Trail of the Dinosaur (1955, essays)
Reflections on Hanging (1956)
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)
The Watershed (1960, abridgement of The Sleepwalkers)
The Lotus and the Robot (1960)
Control of the Mind (1961)
Hanged by the Neck: An Exposure of Capital Punishment (1961, nonfiction, with C.H. Rolph)
Suicide of a Nation? An Inquiry into the State of Britain Today (1963, nonfiction)
The Act of Creation (1964, nonfiction)
Studies in Psychology (1965, nonfiction)
The Ghost in the Machine (1967, nonfiction)
Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967 (1968, essays)
Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences (1969, essays, ed. with J.R. Smythies)
The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971, about Paul Kammerer)
The Roots of Coincidence (1972, nonfiction)
The Call-Girls (1972, novel)
The Lion and the Ostrich (1973)
The Challenge of Chance (1973, nonfiction, with Sir Alister Hardy and Robert Harvie)
The Heel of Achilles: Essays 1968-1974 (1974, essays)
The Thirteenth Tribe. The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (1976, nonfiction)
Life After Death (1976)
Janus: A Summing Up (1978)
Bricks to Babel: Selected Writings With Comments by the Author (1980)
Stranger in the Square (1980, autobiography, volume 3, written with his wife, Cynthia Jefferies Patterson)
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