Arthur Koestler

(1905 - 1983)

While serving as a war correspondent in Spain for a London newspaper in 1937, Arthur Koestler was captured, imprisoned, and sentenced to death by General Francisco Franco’s troops. He published an account of his experience, Spanish Testament, later that year, followed by The Gladiators in 1939 and Darkness at Noon in 1940. Suffering from Parkinson’s disease and leukemia, Koestler, along with his wife, took a purposefully lethal dose of barbiturates on March 1, 1983. He was seventy-seven years old.