Darkness at Noon

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941. First U. S. Edition. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Fair. [12], 267, [1] pages. Small tears at top and bottom edges of spine, wear to edges of boards. Pencil erasure residue on fep. Discoloration and small stains inside boards and flyleaves, ink name ins front flyleaf. Pages slightly darkened, board corners worn. Somewhat cocked. Arthur Koestler, CBE (5 September 1905 - 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931 Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany until, disillusioned by Stalinism, he resigned in 1938. In 1940 he published his novel Darkness at Noon, an anti-totalitarian work that gained him international fame. Over the next 43 years, from his residence in Britain, Koestler espoused many political causes, and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies and numerous essays. In 1968 he was awarded the Sonning Prize "for [his] outstanding contribution to European culture" and in 1972 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 1976 he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and in 1979 with terminal leukemia. In 1983 he and his wife killed themselves at their home in London. Novel based on the victims of the so-called Moscow Trials. Darkness at Noon is a novel by Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best known work, it is the tale of Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik who is arrested, imprisoned, and tried for treason against the government that he had helped to create. The novel is set in 1938 during the Stalinist Great Purge and Moscow show trials. Despite being based on real events, the novel does not name either Russia or the USSR, and tends to use generic terms to describe people and organizations: for example the Soviet government is referred to as "the Party" and Nazi Germany is referred to as "the Dictatorship". Joseph Stalin is represented by "Number One", a menacing dictator. The novel expresses the author's disillusionment with the Soviet Union's version of Communism at the outset of World War II. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Darkness at Noon number eight on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon as the second part of a trilogy: the first volume was The Gladiators (1939), first published in Hungarian. It was a novel about the subversion of the Spartacus revolt. The third novel was Arrival and Departure (1943), about a refugee during World War II. Koestler, who was by then living in London, wrote that novel in English. Darkness at Noon was written in German while Koestler was living in Paris. His companion, the sculptor Daphne Hardy, translated it into English during early 1940 while she was living in Paris with him. For decades the German text was thought to have been lost during the escape of Koestler and Hardy from Paris in May 1940, just before the German occupation of France. However, a copy had been sent to Swiss publisher Emil Oprecht. Rupert Hart-Davis, Koestler's editor at Jonathan Cape had misgivings about the English text but agreed to publish it when a request to Oprecht for his copy went unanswered. At Hart-Davis' prompting, Hardy changed the title from Rubaschow (the main character's name) to Darkness at Noon. In August 2015, Oprecht's copy was identified in a Zurich library by a doctoral candidate of the University of Kassel. Kingsley Martin, reviewing Darkness at Noon, described the novel as "one of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it". The New York Times described Darkness at Noon as " a splendid novel, an effective explanation of the riddle of the Moscow treason trials. . . written with such dramatic power, with such warmth of feeling and with such persuasive simplicity that it is absorbing as melodrama"