Darkness at Noon - Influence

Influence

Writers interested in the political struggles of the time followed Koestler and other Europeans closely. The British author George Orwell wrote, "Rubashov might be called Trotsky, Bukharin, Rakovsky or some other relatively civilised figure among the Old Bolsheviks." In 1944, Orwell noted that the best political writing in English was being done by Europeans and other non-native British. His essay on Koestler discussed Darkness At Noon. In a later review of Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the critic Arthur Mizener said that Orwell drew on his feelings about Koestler's handling of Rubashov's confession when he wrote his extended section of the conversion of Winston Smith.

During 1954, at the end of a long government inquiry and a show trial, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, the former high-ranking Romanian Communist Party member and government official, was sentenced to death in Romania. According to his collaborator Belu Zilber, Pătrăşcanu read Darkness at Noon in Paris while envoy to the 1946 Peace Conference, and took the book back to Romania.

Both American and European Communists considered Darkness at Noon to be anti-Stalinist and anti-USSR. During the 1940s, numerous scriptwriters in Hollywood were still Communists, generally having been attracted to the party during the economic and social crises of the 1930s. According to Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley in an article published during 2000, the Communists considered Koestler's novel important enough to prevent its being adapted for movies; the writer Dalton Trumbo, "bragged" about his success in that to the newspaper The Worker.

At the height of the media attention during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, U.S. President Bill Clinton reportedly referred to Koestler's novel, telling an aide, "I feel like a character in the novel 'Darkness at Noon'," and, "I am surrounded by an oppressive force that is creating a lie about me and I can't get the truth out."