Scum of the Earth - Couverture souple

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905, son of Henrik Koestler, industrialist and inventor. He was educated at the University of Vienna where he became involved in the Zionist movement, travelling to Palestine in 1926 where he worked as a farm labourer and as Jerusalem correspondent for a number of German newspapers.
Koestler was a member of the German Communist party until 1938, but left during Stalin’s purges. He fought on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, was captured by Franco’s forces and sentenced to death, a sentence averted by the intervention of the British Foreign Office. He was interned in France at the start of the Second World War, but escaped to England where he worked for the BBC, becoming a British citizen in 1945.
Koestler had several books published in the thirties but made his international breakthrough with Darkness at Noon (1940) a novel set during Stalin’s reign of terror. He went on to produce many other works of fiction, autobiography, on Communism, science, philosophy, the drug culture and Eastern spiritualism. Arthur Koestler died in 1983, taking his own life in the face of terminal illness.

A brand new edition of Arthur Koestler's gripping tale of arrest, imprisonment, and subsequent escape to London from Nazi-occupied France. Arthur Koestler is now an essential part of the English literary landscape both as political activist, controversialist and the author of Darkness at Noon. He stands beside George Orwell as one of the key writers of the twentieth century who embraced communism but would later turn against the "party"and denounce the tragic distortions and abuses that had betrayed the great vision.