Michael Scammell talked about his book Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (Random House; December 29, 2009). Arthur Koestler is best known for his anti-communist novel, Darkness at Noon, which was first published in 1940. In total, he wrote 34 books over his lifetime. Of those, including Darkness at Noon, five were novels. The rest were non-fiction. In this biography, Michael Scammell tells the complete story of Arthur Koestler’s life including his youth in Budapest, his three marriages and numerous affairs, and his work in various political causes including Zionism, Communism, and anti-Communism. Arthur Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1931 and resigned from it in 1938. He committed suicide in 1983.
Biographer Michael Scammell teaches creative writing and translation at Columbia University. His 1985 biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the Los Angeles Times prize for best biography. He has translated many Russian authors' works into English including Tolstoy, Nabokov, and Dostoyevsky.