Darkness at Ground Zero

When Arthur Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon in 1940, the events he was fictionalizing had just barely moved from the present tense into the past. The Moscow show trials of 1936–38, wherein Leon Trotsky and his associates were accused of assassination plots merely as a way to justify their murders, not only shocked the world, but shocked the Hungarian writer—who had been such a dedicated communist that he went to Berlin in 1933 and Spain during the Spanish Civil War to act as a spy. He saw the deep corruption of the communist movement, turned his back on the political philosophy, and began writing a scathing portrayal of a government that would execute the architects of the revolution’s theoretical structure. By the end of 1940, the manuscript was completed, translated from the German, and published for an English-speaking audience. Now, the book resides securely in the canon.