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Arthur Koestler (September 5, 1905, Budapest – March 3, 1983, London) was a Hungarian polymath who became a naturalized British subject. He wrote journalism, novels, social philosophy, and books on scientific subjects. He was a communist during much of the 1930s, but later became an outspoken anti-communist. He remained politically active until the 1950s. He wrote several popular books, including Arrow in the Blue (the first volume of his autobiography), The Yogi and the Commissar (a collection of essays, many dealing with Communism), The Sleepwalkers (A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe), The Act of Creation, and The Thirteenth Tribe (a new theory on the origins of Eastern European Jews). Koestler's Magnum opus, the novel Darkness at Noon about the Soviet 1930s purges, ranks with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as a fictional treatment of Stalinism. He also wrote Encyclopædia Britannica articles.