Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)
Koestler was born in Budapest, Hungary, 5 September 1905. He attended the University of Vienna, 1922-26, before becoming a journalist. Between 1926-29, he worked on a farm in Palestine and as an architect's assistant, as well as being an editor of a Cairo weekly. He became a foreign correspondent, foreign editor, and science editor for a number of German publishing houses, and in 1931 he was the only journalist on the Graf Zeppelin Arctic expedition.
In 1931, Koestler became a member of the Communist Party and during the 1930s he travelled in Central Asia and the Soviet Union. During the Spanish Civil War, he served as a war correspondent and was imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Fascists. Through the intervention panisof the British government he was released, and his experience of this period was described in Sh testament (1937). His break with the Communist Party at the time of the Moscow Trials was the background to Darkness at noon (1938). That same year, he became editor of Zukunft.
On the outbreak of war in 1939, Koestler was imprisoned in France but was released in 1940. He then escaped to England where he worked for the Ministry of Information, the BBC, and as a night ambulance driver. From 1940, Koestler wrote in English. He became a British citizen in 1948. Works of fiction during this period, include The gladiators (1939) and Arrival and departure (1943), both of which deal with questions of morality and political responsibility. His essays are collected in The yogi and the commissar and other essays (1945) and The god that failed (1949). His last political work, examining the dilemma of Europe after the Second World War, was The age of longing (1951).
In Arrow in the blue (1952) and The invisible writing (1954), Koestler took stock of his life, and then in his later works he tackled scientific and philosophical matters. The act of creation (1964) was perhaps the best known work of this period. Others include The lotus and the robot (1960) examining Eastern mysticism; The ghost in the machine (1967) looking at the effect of evolution on the human brain; and, The thirteenth tribe a study of the origins of the Jewish people (1976). Towards the end of his life a collection of his writings with a new commentary appeared, Bricks to Babel (1981).
Koestler had suffered from leukaemia and Parkinson's disease, and as believers in voluntary euthanasia he and his wife Cynthia took their own lives in 1983. Koestler's death was reported on 3 March 1983.
He set up a trust fund to establish, after his death, a Chair of Parapsychology at a British University. Edinburgh won this honour, and with it Koestler's own archive of most of his surviving MSS and correspondence, and annotated books from his library. The Koestler Archive in Edinburgh University Library: a checklist', by Susan Smyth, was published by the Library in 1987. The original bequest of MSS and of books has been augmented by gifts from the London Library, bequests from Koestler's literary executor Harold Harris, and purchases from the sculptor Daphne Hardy Henrion, and others. Koestler's interest in extra-sensory perception has been further enhanced by the gift to the Library in 1993 by the University of Oxford Museum of 300 volumes on spiritualism and the paranormal from the library of Alfred Russel Wallace.
