Book Description

Arthur Koestler, best known for his world-famous novel Darkness at Noon, stands as a cultural beacon in the post-1945 world. Along with Sartre, Camus and Orwell, he helped to shape the ideas of today. This major reassessment, based on groundbreaking and comprehensive research, sets Koestler's life and thoughts against the tumultuous century he chronicled and explores fully for the first time the continuing drama of his private life as a lover, a husband and a Jew. David Cesarani paints an explosive portrait of Koestler that bridges the gulf separating public and private life, contrasting the work of a genius against the backdrop of his tormented soul and brutal private life. In England, Cesarani's revelations led to the removal of Koestler's bust at the University of Edinburgh, so strong were the feelings roused by his dissection of Koestler as a thinker and as a man. A central European Jew born in 1905, Koestler was molded by his times. Uprooted by war and revolution and hounded by prejudice, he struggled to make sense of a world on the edge of apocalypse. His search for meaning, identity and belonging swept him up in the raging ideological torrents of his times -- Zionism, Communism, anti-Communism and both hard scientific and esoteric mystical pursuits -- and culminated in an idiosyncratic and deeply personal ideological position that has confused and eluded critics and commentators. Equally restless in his personal relationships, Koestler made and broke friendships and marriages. His violent affairs with women were legendary, but until now the shocking details of his private life were hidden from view by loyal friends and obscured by the Olympian prose of his autobiographicalwriting. Cesarani is the first to make unrestricted use of Koestler's private papers. He also draws on previously secret documents held by the KGB and FBI, which expose the depth of Koestler's involvement in the Communist Party and, later, his relations with the CIA. Once a Communist, Koestler eventually rejected Marxism and led the intellectual counterattack that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall. His speculations on human nature and the future of mankind in the atomic age were stamped upon a generation that lived in the shadow of the bomb. But alongside his brilliance and charm was a darker side, fully plumbed here for the first time, which led ultimately to the tragic dual suicide with his third wife, Cynthia, in 1983. With Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind David Cesarani has ensured Koestler's place in the pantheon of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century as surely as his forceful, provocative and groundbreaking study is guaranteed to reignite the controversy that swirled around Koestler in his life and his death, in his work and his actions.