Koestler, Arthur
deviationistbelief in the individual. Koestler's other significant accounts of the evils of Stalinism include The Yogi and the Commissar (1945), and the essay he contributed to The God That Failed (ed. by R. H. Crossman, 1951).
Koestler's later writings ranged over a wide variety of subjects. His later novels include Thieves in the Night (1946), a powerful description of the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, The Age of Longing (1951), and The Call Girls: A Tragicomedy (1973). He wrote extensively on science in such works as The Lotus and the Robot (1960), The Act of Creation (1964), The Ghost in the Machine (1968), The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971), and The Roots of Coincidence (1972). Greatly concerned in later life with euthanasia and the right to die, an ailing Koestler and his healthy wife committed joint suicide in 1983. The author of more than 30 books and hundreds of articles, Koestler combined a brilliant journalistic style with an understanding of the great movements of his times and a participant's sense of commitment.
See his autobiographies, Scum of the Earth (1941), Arrow in the Blue (1952), The Invisible Writing (1954), and Janus: A Summing Up (1978) biographies by I. Hamilton (1982), D. Cesarani (1999), and M. Scammell (2009) studies by W. Mays (1973), S. Pearson (1978), and P. J. Keane (1980).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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