He was a vocal supporter of voluntary euthanasia, and in 1983 he and his third wife Cynthia killed themselves by overdosing on pills. At the end of his life he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Eventually, Koestler would become especially interested in creativity, mysticism, and their relationship with science. The essays collected in The Yogi and the Commissar (1945) and The God that Failed (1949) explore his disillusionment with Communism. For the rest of his life, he continued publishing novels, memoirs, and critical works. He fled to England, joining the French Foreign Legion to escape arrest, and eventually became a British citizen in 1948. In 1939, while he was writing the novel and living in Paris with his lover Daphne Hardy, Koestler was arrested on suspicion of working for the Soviets and was sent to an internment camp. The latter in particular led to his writing of Darkness at Noon. He slowly became disillusioned with communism as a result of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1938 and the revelation of the Moscow show trials. During the Spanish Civil War, when he went to Spain as a Soviet agent, Koestler was arrested and spent time in prison. At the end of 1931, he applied for membership in the Communist Party of Germany. He attended the University of Vienna and subsequently became a journalist, reporting in the Middle East, Paris, and Berlin, among other places. Arthur Koestler was born to a family of Jewish Hungarians who were moderately well-off.
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