Darkness at Noon

Front Cover
Longmans, 1968 - Fiction - 249 pages
Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, "Darkness At Noon," is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. During Stalin's purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the party he has devoted his life to. Under mounting pressure to confess to crimes he did not commit, Rubashov relives a career that embodies the ironies and betrayals of a revolutionary dictatorship that believes it is an instrument of liberation. A seminal work of twentieth-century literature, "Darkness At Noon" is a penetrating exploration of the moral danger inherent in a system that is willing to enforce its beliefs by any means necessary.

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About the author (1968)

Arthur Koestler was born on September 5, 1905 in Budapest, Hungary and studied at the University of Vienna. Koestler was a Middle East correspondent for several German newspapers, wrote for the Manchester Guardian, the London Times and the New York Herald Tribune. Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon, which centers on the destructiveness of politics, The Act of Creation, a book about creativity, and The Ghost in the Machine, which bravely attacks behaviorism. Arthur Koestler died in London on March 3, 1983.

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