Darkness at Noon - Background

Background

Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon as the second part of a trilogy: the first volume was The Gladiators (1939), first published in Hungarian. It was a novel about the subversion of the Spartacus revolt. The third novel was Arrival and Departure (1943), about a refugee during World War II. By then living in London, Koestler wrote that novel in English. Of these two, only The Gladiators has had much sales success.

Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon in German while living in Paris. His companion, the sculptor Daphne Hardy, translated it into English during early 1940 while she was living with him in Paris. The German text was lost as Koestler and Hardy escaped Paris separately during May 1940, just before the German army occupation after its defeat of the French. On reaching England, Hardy began arranging to have the manuscript published.

Koestler joined the French Foreign Legion, deserted it in North Africa, and eventually made his way to Portugal. Waiting in Lisbon for passage to England, Koestler heard a false report that the ship taking Hardy to England had been torpedoed and all persons lost (along with his only manuscript); he attempted suicide. (He wrote about this incident in Scum of the Earth (1941), his memoir of that period.) Koestler finally arrived in London, and the book was published there during early 1941.