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Arthur Koestler CBE (September 5, 1905, Budapest - March 3, 1983, London) was a Hungarian polymath who became a naturalized British subject. He wrote journalism, novels, social philosophy, and books on scientific subjects. In 1931, he joined the Communist Party of Germany, but left the party seven years later, after emigrating to the United Kingdom. By the late 1940s, he was one of the most recognized and outspoken British anti-communists, and he remained politically active through the 1950s. He wrote several popular books, including Arrow in the Blue (the first volume of his autobiography), The Yogi and the Commissar (a collection of essays, many dealing with Communism), The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe, The Act of Creation, and The Thirteenth Tribe (a new theory on the origins of Eastern European Jews). Koestler's Magnum opus, the novel Darkness at Noon about the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, ranks with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as a fictional treatment of Stalinism. He also wrote Encyclopædia Britannica articles.
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