In The Freeman Online, Bruce Edward Walker brings to mind a once-popular mid-20th-century author:

Perhaps no author better chronicled the disastrous, soul-crushing European political experiments of the middle half of the twentieth century than Arthur Koestler. The Hungarian-born author wrote magisterially (in English, no less; he first published in Hungarian, German, and Russian) of the follies of the Pink Decade of the 1930s in a series of political novels. Unfortunately, they’re all but forgotten in today’s university curricula. The world requires constant reminders of what actually happens once citizens acquiesce to big-government solutions.

. . . . As this year officially marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of Koestler’s seminal novel, Darkness at Noon, and the 60th anniversary of his essay “The Initiates,” it’s a convenient opportunity to revisit both works as a reminder of what awaits all democratic societies eager to abandon liberties for the sake of utopian ideologies.

Marxism proved, not for Koestler alone, a harsh mistress to please, one incapable of returning his devotion. Stalin’s purges in the ’30s — including his grotesque show trials — effectively ended Koestler’s affair with Communism, provoking his fictional jeremiads in the ’40s and thereafter.

Walker’s article is here.

Several of Arthur Koestler’s books are available on Amazon.com:

The Gladiators (novel)
Darkness at Noon (novel)

Arrival and Departure (novel)

The Age of Longing (novel)
The God That Failed (nonfiction)