Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic by Michael Scammell (Random House, 690 Pages, $35.) The caravan of colossal current literary biography continues. Joseph Frank’s magisterial five-volume biography of Dostoevsky—one of the exemplary achievements of our era—has invaluably been published in an abridged one-volume edition. (Princeton University Press, 984 pages, $35).

And now one of the 20th century’s stormiest and most dramatic and eventful literary lives has just received a huge biography every bit as accomplished as it must have been difficult. The very epigraph by Danilo Kis to translator Michael Scammell’s book explains its necessity: “Koestler’s intellectual adventure, through to his ultimate choice [i. e. suicide while suffering from protracted illness] is unique even within the most broadly defined borders of Europe. It contains the potential biography of every Central European intellectual.” From political storm-chasing journalist to novelist to thinker to symposiast, Koestler was an electromagnetically charged citizen of the intellectual world.

To the literary life of the 20th century, his novel “Darkness at Noon” will always be essential, as will his contribution to the pivotal Marxist repudiations in “The God That Failed.” But at least half a dozen other books by Koestler are likely to have a long life indeed, including two of the best written after his 1955 disavowal of political writing— his extraordinary history of the great cosmologists, “The Sleepwalkers,” and the book that followed from it “The Act of Creation.”

What Scammell can do in his biography that Koestler never could in his magnificent multivolume autobiography is examine that most 21st century of subjects, Koestler’s prodigious and sometimes brutal relationships with women that, in a post-feminist age, can’t help but figure with a prominence that might have appalled Koestler. (One Koestler intimate called him “a woman hater at heart.”)A great biography of an amazing subject.

—Jeff Simon