Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual

Scammell, Professor Michael

ISBN 10: 0571138535 / ISBN 13: 9780571138531

Published by Faber & Faber, 2010

The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine. Seller Inventory # GOR004542811

Synopsis:

Best known as the author of the classic Darkness at Noon, Koestler was one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals, involved in and commenting on almost every political movement of the twentieth century. As young man, he was a committed Zionist and moved to Palestine; he was imprisoned and sentenced to death in Franco's Spain; escaped Occupied France; and was a member of the Communist party for seven years, later becoming one of its fiercest critics with the publication of Darkness at Noon.

Without sentimentality, Scammell gives a full account of Koestler's turbulent private life: his drug use, manic depression, the frenetic womanizing that doomed his three marriages and led to an accusation of rape, and his startling suicide pact with his wife in 1983. Koestler also gives a full account of the author's voluminous writings, making the case that the autobiographies and essays are fit to stand beside Darkness at Noon as works of lasting literary value. Michael Scammell creates an indelible portrait of this brilliant, unpredictable, and talented writer, once memorably described as "one third blackguard, one third lunatic, and one third genius."

About the Author:

Michael Scammell won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography in 1985 for his life of Solzhenitsyn, and is the translator of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, and Solzhenitsyn, among many others. He is a former president of PEN American Center and a vice-president of International PEN, and has written regularly for the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. He teaches non-fiction writing and translation in the School of the Arts at Columbia.

His most recent work, Koestler, won the 2010 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Award for Biography and the Spears magazine award for the Best Biography of 2010. It was also chosen as one of the 'Notable Books of the Year' by the New York Times Book Review.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication Date: 2010
Binding: Hardback
Condition: Good