joseph conrad biography

Joseph Conrad

(1857-1924)

Who Was Joseph Conrad?

Regarded as one of the best novelists, Joseph Conrad wrote short stories and novels like Lord Jim , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent , which combined his experiences in remote places with an interest in moral conflict and the dark side of human nature.

Early Life and Background

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in Berdichev (now Berdychiv), Ukraine. His parents, Apollo and Evelina Korzeniowski, were members of the Polish noble class. They were also Polish patriots who conspired against oppressive Russian rule; as a consequence, they were arrested and sent to live in the Russian province of Vologda with their 4-year-old son. When Conrad's parents died several years later, he was raised by an uncle in Poland.

Conrad's education was erratic. He was first tutored by his literary father, then attended school in Krakow and received further private schooling. At the age of 16, Conrad left Poland and traveled to the port city of Marseilles, France, where he began his years as a mariner.

Seafaring Years

Through an introduction to a merchant who was a friend of his uncle, Conrad sailed on several French commercial ships, first as an apprentice and then as a steward. He traveled to the West Indies and South America, and he may have participated in international gun-smuggling.

After a period of debt and a failed suicide attempt, Conrad joined the British merchant marines, where he was employed for 16 years. He rose in rank and became a British citizen, and his voyages around the world—he sailed to India, Singapore, Australia and Africa—gave him experiences that he would later reinterpret in his fiction.

Literary Career

After his seafaring years, Conrad began to put down roots on land. In 1896, he married Jessie Emmeline George, daughter of a bookseller; they had two sons. He also had friendships with prominent writers such as John Galsworthy, Ford Madox Ford and H.G. Wells .

Conrad began his own literary career in 1895 with the publication of his first novel, Almayer's Folly , an adventure tale set in the Borneo jungles. Before the turn of the century, he wrote two of his most famous and enduring novels. Lord Jim (1900) is the story of an outcast young sailor who comes to terms with his past acts of cowardice and eventually becomes the leader of a small South Seas country. Heart of Darkness (1902) is a novella describing a British man's journey deep into the Congo of Africa, where he encounters the cruel and mysterious Kurtz, a European trader who has established himself as a ruler of the native people there.

Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness contain the signature elements of Conrad's writing: faraway settings; dramatic conflicts between human characters and the brutal forces of nature; and themes of individualism, the violent side of human nature and racial prejudice. Conrad was interested in showing "psycho-political" situations that drew parallels between the inner lives of single characters and the broader sweep of human history.

Conrad continued to achieve success as an author, publishing such further novels as Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907), short-story collections and a memoir titled A Personal Record (1912). Many of his major works first appeared as serialized pieces in magazines, followed by the publication of the complete novel. As his career progressed, Conrad also collected income through reprints of his novels and the sale of film rights for several books.

Over the last two decades of his life, Conrad produced more autobiographical writings and novels, including The Arrow of Gold and The Rescue . His final novel, The Rover , was published in 1923. Conrad died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924, at his home in Canterbury, England.

Conrad's work influenced numerous later 20th century writers, from T.S. Eliot and Graham Greene to Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner . His books have been translated into dozens of languages and are still taught in schools and universities.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Joseph
• Birth Year: 1857
• Birth date: December 3, 1857
• Birth City: Berdichev (now Berdychiv)
• Birth Country: Ukraine
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Joseph Conrad was an author who is remembered for novels like 'Heart of Darkness,' which drew on his experience as a mariner and addressed profound themes of nature and existence.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Sagittarius
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness inspired Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now .
• Death Year: 1924
• Death date: August 3, 1924
• Death City: Canterbury, England
• Death Country: United Kingdom

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Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; December 3, 1857 - August 3, 1924) was one of the greatest English-language novelists of all time, despite the fact he was born in the Russian Empire to a Polish-speaking family. After a long career in the merchant marine, he eventually settled in England and became one of the most prominent novelists of the early 20th century, writing classics such as Heart of Darkness (1899) , Lord Jim (1900), and Nostromo (1904).

Fast Facts: Joseph Conrad

• Full Name : Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski
• Occupation : Writer
• Born : December 3, 1857, in Berdychiv, Russian Empire
• Died : August 3, 1924, in Bishopsbourne, Kent, England
• Parents: Apollo Nalęcz Korzeniowski and Ewa Bobrowska
• Spouse : Jessie George
• Children : Borys and John
• Selected Works : Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904)
• Notable Quote : "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."

Joseph Conrad's family was of Polish descent and lived in Berdychiv, a city now part of Ukraine and then part of the Russian empire. It is located in a region that the Polish sometimes refer to as the "Stolen Lands," since it was taken from the Kingdom of Poland. Conrad's father, Apollo Korzeniowski, a writer and political activist, took part in the Polish resistance to Russian rule. He was imprisoned in 1861 when the future author was a young child. The family endured exile to Vologda, three hundred miles north of Moscow, in 1862, and they were later moved to Chernihiv in northeast Ukraine. As a consequence of the family's struggles, Conrad's mother, Ewa, died of tuberculosis in 1865.

Apollo raised his son as a single father and introduced him to the works of French novelist Victor Hugo and the plays of William Shakespeare . They moved to the Austrian-held section of Poland in 1867 and enjoyed more freedom. Suffering from tuberculosis like his wife, Apollo died in 1869 leaving his son an orphan at age eleven.

Conrad moved in with his maternal uncle. He was raised to pursue a career as a sailor. At age sixteen, fluent in French, he moved to Marseilles, France, to look for a career in the merchant marine.

Merchant Marine Career

Conrad sailed for four years on French ships before joining the British merchant marine. He served for fifteen more years under the British flag. He eventually rose to the rank of captain. The elevation to that rank came unexpectedly. He sailed on the ship Otago out of Bangkok, Thailand, and the captain died at sea. By the time the Otago arrived at its destination in Singapore, the entire crew except Conrad and the cook were suffering from fever.

The characters in Joseph Conrad's writing are mostly drawn from his experiences at sea. Three years of association with a Belgian trading company as captain of a ship on the Congo River led directly to the novella Heart of Darkness .

Conrad completed his final long-distance voyage in 1893. One of the passengers on the ship Torrens was 25-year-old future novelist John Galsworthy . He became a good friend of Conrad shortly before the latter began his writing career.

Success as a Novelist

Joseph Conrad was 36 when he left the merchant marine in 1894. He was ready to seek a second career as a writer. He published his first novel Almayer's Folly in 1895. Conrad was concerned that his English might not be strong enough for publication, but readers soon considered his approach to the language as a non-native writer an asset.

Conrad set the first novel in Borneo, and his second, An Outcast of the Islands , takes place in and around the island of Makassar. The two books helped him develop a reputation as a teller of exotic tales. That depiction of his work frustrated Conrad, who looked to be taken seriously as a top writer of English literature.

During the next fifteen years, Conrad published what most consider the finest works of his career. His novella Heart of Darkness appeared in 1899. He followed it with the novel Lord Jim in 1900 and Nostromo in 1904.

Literary Celebrity

In 1913, Joseph Conrad experienced a commercial breakthrough with the publication of his novel Chance . Today it is not viewed as one of his best works, but it outsold all of his previous novels and left the author with financial security for the rest of his life. It was the first of his novels to focus on a woman as a central character.

Conrad's next novel, Victory , released in 1915, continued his commercial success. However, critics found the style melodramatic and expressed concern that the author's artistical skills were fading. Conrad celebrated his financial success by building the house he called Oswalds in Bishopsbourne, Canterbury, England.

Personal Life

Joseph Conrad suffered from a range of physical maladies, most of them due to exposure during his years in the merchant marine. He battled gout and recurrent attacks of malaria. He also struggled occasionally with depression.

In 1896, while in the early years of his writing career, Conrad married Jessie George, an Englishwoman. She gave birth to two sons, Borys and John.

Conrad counted many other prominent writers as friends. Among the closest were future Nobel laureate John Galsworthy, American Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and collaborator on two novels, Ford Madox Ford.

Later Years

Joseph Conrad continued to write and publish novels through his final years. Many observers considered the five years after World War I ended in 1919 the most peaceful part of the author's life. Some of Conrad's contemporaries pushed for recognition with a Nobel Prize for Literature , but it was not forthcoming.

In April 1924, Joseph Conrad turned down the offer of a British knighthood due to his background in Polish nobility. He also turned down offers of honorary degrees from five prestigious universities. In August 1924, Conrad died at his home of an apparent heart attack. He is buried with his wife, Jessie, in Canterbury, England.

Shortly after Joseph Conrad's death, many critics focused on his ability to create stories that illuminated exotic locales and to humanize sordid events. Later analysis has focused on deeper elements in his fiction. He often examines the corruption that lies just beneath the surface of otherwise admirable characters. Conrad focuses on fidelity as a crucial theme. It can save the soul and wreak terrible destruction when it is breached.

Conrad's powerful narrative style and the use of anti-heroes as main characters have influenced a wide range of great writers of the 20th century, from William Faulkner to George Orwell and Gabriel Garcia Marquez . He paved the way for the development of modernist fiction.

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Joseph Conrad Biography

Born: December 3, 1857 Berdyczew, Poland Died: August 3, 1924 Bishopsbourne, England Polish-born English writer and novelist

Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad is one of the great modern writers of England. His novels reflect his concerns with the complex individual, and how sympathy and imagination can blur clear judgment—which is essential to life. The character development in Conrad's books is engaging and powerful.

Childhood in Poland and Russia

Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad) was born to Joseph Theodore Appollonius Korzeniowski and Evelina Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in Berdyczew, Poland. His father was a writer and a translator of the works of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). He was also a member of a movement seeking Polish independence from Russia. In 1862 the family was forced to move to Russia because of his father's political activities. Conrad's mother died three years later in 1865. It was not until 1867 that Conrad and his father were allowed to return to Poland.

In 1868 Conrad attended high school in the Austrian province of Galicia for one year. The following year he and his father moved to Cracow, Poland, where his father died in 1869. From the time spent with his father, Conrad became a lover of literature, especially tales of the sea. After his father's death, his uncle, Thaddus Bobrowski, took Conrad in and raised him.

Merchant marine service and marriage

As a teenager the future novelist began dreaming of going to sea. In 1873, while on vacation in western Europe, Conrad saw the sea for the first time. In the autumn of 1874 Conrad went to Marseilles, France, where he entered the French marine service. For the next twenty years Conrad led a successful career as a ship's officer. In 1877 he probably took part in the illegal shipment of arms from France to Spain in support of the pretender to the Spanish throne, Don Carlos (1788–1855). At about this time Conrad seems to have fallen in love with a girl who was also a supporter of Carlos. The affair ended in a duel with an American named J. M. K. Blunt. This was the first time Conrad thought of taking his own life.

In June 1878 Conrad went to England for the first time. He worked as a seaman on English ships, and in 1880 he began his career as an officer in the British merchant service, rising from third mate to master. His voyages took him to distant and exotic places such as Australia, India, Singapore, Java, and Borneo, which would provide the background for much of his fiction. In 1886 he became a British citizen. He received his first command in 1888. In 1890 he traveled to the Belgian Congo, Zaire, and Africa, which inspired his great short novel The Heart of Darkness.

In 1896 he married Jessie George, an Englishwoman. Two years later, just after the birth of Borys, the first of their two sons, they settled in Kent in the south of England, where Conrad lived for the rest of his life. John Galsworthy was the first of a number of English and American writers who befriended Conrad. Others were Henry James (1843–1916), Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), Stephen Crane (1871–1900), and Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford (1873–1939), with whom Conrad collaborated on two novels.

Early novels, political novels

From 1896 through 1904 Conrad wrote novels about places he visited as a merchant marine and he explored themes such as the uncertainties of human sympathy. His early novels included An Outcast of the Islands (1896), The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897), The Heart of Darkness (1899), and Lord Jim (1900).

The next three novels reflected Conrad's political side. The theme of Nostromo (1904) was the relationship between man's deepest needs (his psychology) and his public actions and decisions. The description of London, England, in The Secret Agent (1907) was similar to Charles Dickens's works. It portrayed a city of mean streets and shabby lives. In Under Western Eyes (1911) Conrad examined the Russian temperament.

Conrad's next novel, Chance (1914), was a study of solitude and sympathy. Because of its financial success and the efforts of his American publisher, he was able to live without worrying about money for the rest of his life. Victory (1915), his last important novel, further examined the theme of solitude and sympathy.

Last novels and death

Although Conrad's last novels, The Shadow Line (1917) and The Rover (1923), were written as a farewell, he received many honors. In 1923 he visited the United States to great fanfare. The year after, he declined an offer of knighthood in England.

On August 3, 1924, Conrad died of a heart attack and was buried at Canterbury, England. His gravestone bears these lines from Edmund Spenser (1552–1599): "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,/ Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please."

For More Information

Baines, Jocelyn. Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960. Reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975, 1960.

Karl, Frederick R., and Laurence Davies, eds. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Joseph Conrad: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991.

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Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was born on the 3 rd  of December in 1857 in Berdychiv, Ukraine. He was the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski, a translator and political activist, while his mother, Ewa Bobrowska.  Due to his father’s political activism, the family had to move frequently. In 1861, the family faced a heavy blow on account of the tragedy when Apollo, his father, faced detention, and the family had to follow him to face political persecution. During these years, his mother’s health began to deteriorate, and she lost her life in 1865. All these incidents played a key role in shaping his innocent mind, which he later presented in his work.

After the demise of his mother, Joseph’s father tried to homeschool his son. In a personal record, he wrote that he first encountered the English language at the age of eight when his father translated some great works of Victor Hugo and Shakespeare for him. Under his father’s guidance, he studied the masterpieces of James Fennimore, Sir Walter Scott , William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Dickens . Unfortunately, his father also died in 1989 when he was just eleven, leaving him in the custody of his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, a lawyer, who provided him comfort and love of home. He sent him to school to Karkow and Switzerland, but Conrad always desired to go to the sea.  His uncle supported him and introduced him to one of the influential merchants of that time.

Before pursuing his career as a writer, he spent twenty years of his life in marine service and his voyages took him to the exotic and distant places such as Australia, Congo, Africa , England, India and Singapore. These experiences and interactions with multiple nationalities paved the way for most of his writings. He not only discussed his own experiences in his works but also reflect upon the behavioral traits of the people, their history, geographical specifics of their values and unique sets of their beliefs.

Some Important Facts of His Life

• In 1896, he married, Jessie Emmeline George, and the couple had two sons.
• His world- famous novel , Heart of Darkness , appeared as a film and as an opera in 2011.
• Most of his novels have been translated into many languages around the world.
• In 1878, he tried to kill himself with a gun but luckily survived.
• He died of a heart attack in 1924 and was buried at Canterbury, England.

Joseph Conrad successfully pursued two careers in his life. First, he chose marine service as a career and spent twenty years traveling to different places and continents. However, in the early 1980s, Joseph decided to document his traveling experiences in his work. Thus, he retired from the service and published his first work, Almayer’s Folly, in 1895. The heartwarming response of the audience gave him the confidence to go for more. Therefore, from 1896 to 1904, he wrote pieces about the places he visited with a core focus of humanity. His early writings include The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, An Outcast of the Islands, The Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Later, in his novels, The Secret Agent, In Under Western Eyes and Nostromo , he reflected upon his political views. Besides novels, he also wrote shorter fiction and essays, some of which include “The Shadow Line”, “The Rover”, “The Return” and “The Shock of War.”

Joseph Conrad’s style was not inherently English. Instead, his exposure to the world, multi-linguistic capacity and coming to English in his late twenties mark the central point of his distinctive writing style. His narrative is full of indirect, winding, tautological, and ambiguous structures, which sometimes create trouble for the readers. The stuttering placement of adjectives and awkwardly positioned punctuation along with complex syntax reflect the mastery of his art. It is because of his shifting narrative style; he is recognized as a modern novelist among the accepted literary canons .

Moreover, his stylistic experimentations allowed him to re-evaluate the most recurrent thematic intrigue: morality. Early critics considered him a moral sage whose ideas reject the preaching of truths and noble sentiments. Rather, in his novels and other works, he has successfully questioned the accepted belief system along with a standard set of values. He pulls his readers to rethink their own knowledge and its limitations.

Some Important Works of Joseph Conrad

• Best Novels: He was an outstanding writer, some of his best novels include Heart of Darkness, An Outcast of the Islands, Almayer’s Folly, The Arrow of Gold, Chance, Victory and The Secret Agent.
• Other Works: Besides novels, he tried his hands on shorter fiction and essays. Some of them include “The Black Mate”, “The Idiot”, “Youth”, “A Smile of Fortune”, “The Shock of War” and “The First News.”

Joseph Conrad’s Impact on Future Literature  

Joseph Conrad, with his unique experiences, mesmerized the generations and left a deep imprint on the world of letters. He won a wide readership for presenting the fragility of human nature in a time when other writers attempted to fictionalize the world. He had had a significant influence on other writers, including T.S Eliot, who praised his efforts to present new objects , new feelings, and new ideas. His commentary on a human belief system is relevant even to today’s world. He successfully documented his ideas about politics, humanity, and reality in his writings that even today writers try to imitate his unique style, considering him a beacon for writing prose .

Famous Quotes

• “I don’t like work–no man does–but I like what is in the work–the chance to find yourself. Your own reality–for yourself not for others–what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.” ( Heart of Darkness )
• “I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.” ( Heart of Darkness )
• “Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank — but that’s not the same thing.” ( The Secret Sharer and other stories )  

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Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad (December 3, 1857 – August 3, 1924) was a Polish -born British novelist , one of the most important and respected writers of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Conrad's works emerge out of the confluence of three literary currents prominent in the Europe of Conrad's time: Romanticism , particularly in the works of Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz ; realism , which flowered in Russia in the works of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky ; and modernism , which emerged as the dominant literary aesthetic of the twentieth century.

Conrad's works draw on the symbolism of the Romantics and the psychological acuity of the realist and modernist schools. Despite these affinities, Conrad defies easy categorization. Conrad saw in Western colonialism the failure of the "civilized world" to fulfill its moral responsibilities. He witnessed and then documented through his fiction how the "white man's burden," or the West's responsibility to the rest of the world, became clouded by selfish ambition through its quest for colonial domination.

• 1 Biography
• 2.1.1 Themes
• 2.3 Criticism
• 4 Novels and novellas
• 5 Short stories
• 6 Memoirs and Essays
• 8 External links

Born and raised in Poland, Conrad spent part of his youth in France and the majority of his early life at sea; only in his mid-thirties would he settle down, in England , to start a career as a writer, writing not in Polish or French, but in English , his adopted third language. Like the Russian émigré Vladamir Nabokov, Conrad is regarded as a master prose stylist among authors in the English literary canon. His knowledge of languages and cultures, gleaned not only from his European experiences but also from his decades spent as a sailor at sea, can be seen in the haunting style of his prose and the enormity of the themes which he constantly brings to the surface. His works inspired writers throughout the twentieth century.

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (of the Nałęcz coat-of-arms) in Berdyczów (now Berdychiv, Ukraine ) into a highly patriotic landowning noble family. Conrad's father, a writer of patriotic tragedies and a translator from French and English, was arrested by the Russian authorities in Warsaw for his activities in support of the January Uprising, and was exiled to Siberia. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1865, as did his father four years later in Kraków, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven.

He was placed in the care of his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, in Kraków—a more cautious figure than either of his parents. Bobrowski nevertheless allowed Conrad to travel to Marseille and begin a career as a seaman at the age of 17, after the failure to secure Conrad Austro-Hungarian citizenship made him liable for a 25-year conscription into the Russian army. During these early years Conrad learned English by reading the London Times and the works of Thomas Carlyle and William Shakespeare .

In the mid-1870s Conrad joined the French merchant marines as an apprentice, and made three voyages to the West Indies. In 1878, after being wounded in what may have been a failed suicide attempt, Conrad took service in the British merchant navy, where rose through the ranks over the next 16 years. In 1886 he gained both his Master Mariner's certificate and British citizenship and officially changed his name to Joseph Conrad. In the same year he took command of his own ship, the Otago.

Conrad called on ports in Australia, Borneo, Malaysia, various stations throughout the Indian Ocean, South America, and the South Pacific. In 1890 he journeyed up the Congo River in west Africa, a journey that provided much material for his novella Heart of Darkness. However, the fabled East Indies particularly attracted Conrad and it became the setting of many of his stories.

During these long years at sea Conrad began to write, and many of his greatest works, including Lord Jim, Nostromo, "Typhoon," "The Nigger of the Narcissus,"and "The Secret Sharer," drew directly from his maritime travels. Elemental nature profoundly impressed Conrad, and his experience of loneliness at sea, of the corruption inherent in intimate human relations in the microcosm of ship life, forged a coherent, if bleak, vision of the world. Like Herman Melville 's Billy Budd, Sailor, Conrad's fiction explores the relentless progress of character flaws within the matrix of social relationships. Conrad expressed his deterministic view of the world in an 1897 letter: "What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well-but soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife. The tragedy begins."

Conrad left the sea at the age of 36 and settled in England, married, and devoted himself to writing. Always a keen observer of social landscapes, he absorbed the sights and scenes of London, from the docks to the slums to the drawing rooms of the literary elite, which included G.K. Chesterton , Ford Madox Ford , Henry James and H.G. Wells . Financial security was a serious problem for Conrad until the 1920s, when he began to obtain substantial serial contracts and sell in large numbers.

Conrad was an Anglophile, who regarded Britain as a land which respected individual liberties. He continued to write prolifically, although he largely wrote in obscurity until late in his career, when the publication of the novel Chance finally brought him fame and success. Ironically, scholars generally agree that the novels written after Chance' s publication in 1913 are lesser works than the dark novels Conrad wrote in his earlier years. Conrad continued to write and publish up until his death from a heart attack in 1924, aged 66.

Conrad's first novels, Almayer's Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), were sea tales that drew from Conrad's experiences. The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' a novella published in 1897, demonstrated a development of Conrad's psychological powers, and utilized a device he would return to in "the Secret Sharer" as well as his major novels: the introduction of an enigmatic figure who serves as a touchstone for society's values as well as a dramatic foil. The novella Heart of Darkness (1899), perhaps Conrad's best-known work, and Lord Jim (1900), both narrated by the shadowy sailor Marlow, are set in remote and exotic regions—the upper Congo River and the Indonesian archipelago respectively—and explore the psychic fortunes of Europeans cast into near oblivion.

Youth (1902) recalled Conrad's experiences in Palestine, while the critically acclaimed Nostromo (1904) again explored the theme of vulnerability and corruptibility, with the Italian Nostromo rising in influence like Kurtz and Lord Jim, but set in a fictional country in South America. In The Secret Agent (1907), dedicated to H.G. Wells, and Under Western Eyes Conrad explored revolutionary and Utopian politics with a skeptical eye in tightly plotted mystery novels set in turn-of-the-century-England and Russia .

Conrad also collaborated with Ford Madox Ford in The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). Interestingly, Conrad despised Dostoevsky , another Slavic writer and master of psychology often cited as marking the transition between realist and modern fiction. Conrad despised Russian writers as a rule, due to his parents' deaths at the hands of the Russian authorities, making an exception only for Ivan Turgenev .

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness, published in 1902, is arguably Conrad's most widely known work. It was originally serialized in three parts in Blackwood's Magazine (1899). The highly symbolic tale is actually a story within a story. The narrator, a man whose name we never learn, is traveling up the Thames in the middle of the night with a group of passengers, among them a mysterious traveler named Marlow. With almost no prompting, recalling Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Marlow recounts a mesmerizing story of his adventures to the other passengers. Marlow relates how he was hired by a Belgian trading company to travel up what presumably is the Congo River (although the name of the country Marlow is visiting is never specified in the text) to investigate the work of Kurtz, a Belgian trader in ivory who apparently has gone insane.

As Marlow travels upriver, he witnesses more and more savagery, both among the African natives and the imperialist Belgians who have employed him. These fictionalized accounts almost certainly draw on Conrad's own experiences. Eight years before he had served as a captain aboard a Congo steamer; on a single trip up the river, he witnessed so many atrocities that he quit on the spot. The Belgian Congo of that time, under the rule of the tyrannical King Leopold, was notorious even among imperial colonies for its brutality and oppression. Marlow's travel up the river follows a similar descent, and by the time Marlow reaches Kurtz—who has installed himself as a tyrannical god-king among the natives—he is no longer sure whether fulfilling his mission of bringing Kurtz to the authorities would do any justice at all in such a lawless place. Kurtz's moment of illumination comes just before his death. His emotive last words, "The horror, the horror!' came to symbolize the corrupting influence of the racist imperialist enterprise and, further, the modernist sense of alienation and meaninglessness at the heart of "civilization."

Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" alludes superficially to the unknown and the barbarous, contrasted with the "light of civilization." But the contrast of barbarity and civilization cuts both ways. Perhaps the most apt (and vexing) image for this muddling of light and darkness can be found in the painting of the traditional figure of the blindfolded goddess of Justice that Marlow discovers along his journey; instead of holding a scale, she carries a torch, and is painted on a background of dense darkness. Marlow, holding a candle, moves closer to the painting, to try to make sense of it; but at the moment the candle goes out. The painting, as it turns out, was done by none other than Kurtz a year before he departed for the Congo. The irony and peculiarity of the scene—with an image of blind justice bringing light to darkness, and Marlow bringing a light to the image, only to have it go out at the moment he thinks he can discern the meaning of the picture—reflect on the manifold levels of lightness and darkness as they ripple throughout the text. More tellingly, the novella explores Europe's, and civilization's, "heart of darkness"; Marlow's journey leads deeper and deeper into the dark recesses of imperialist Europe until at journey's end he is confronted by the depraved Kurtz.

Elsewhere, early in the novella, the narrator recounts how London —the largest, most populous and wealthiest city in the world, where Conrad wrote and where a large part of his audience lived—was itself in Roman times a dark part of the world much like the Congo is now.

in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Conrad famously defined his aims as a novelist: "A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colors, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their existence."

Writing in what was the age of symbolism in poetry and impressionism in the visual arts, Conrad showed himself in many of his works a prose poet of the highest order: thus, for instance, in the evocative Patna and courtroom scenes of Lord Jim ; in the "melancholy-mad elephant" and gunboat scenes of Heart of Darkness ; in the doubled protagonists of The Secret Sharer ; Conrad created a style that was at the same time deliberate and measured while at the same time nebulous. Hence, one might suggest that Conrad was perhaps a sort of prose impressionist, in that, like the painters of France with whom he was familiar, he strived to create works that duplicated the sense of impressionisme —that sense, as he articulates above, of seeing, ever so briefly, a glimpse of the sudden, ephemeral truth.

"In Conrad's writing generally," says English novelist Giles Foden, "the grandiloquent Edwardian temper shades into something hesitantly modern, as the forthrightness of imperialist subject matter is undercut by the obliquities of narrative form. All this leaves his works unclassifiable, … as the critic Frederic Jameson has put it, 'floating uncertainly between Proust and Robert Louis Stevenson .' "

Chinua Achebe has argued that Conrad's language and imagery is inescapably racist , [1] probably in large part on account of his first few novels, which show little insight into the natives he describes. Conrad associated the wild with despair, death, and savage, inhuman acts; nevertheless, in his depiction of London and industrial man he paints a similarly gloomy picture. He uses this symbolism in many of his novels, but most powerfully in Heart of Darkness, where he shows that the racist imperialism of the Europeans made them into worse savages than any of those they colonized.

Europeans and Africans are portrayed as being at different stages in their cultural development, which does not necessarily suggest that Conrad felt Africans to be inferior. Readers of Conrad's other works will know how critical he is of modern civilization . Indeed, African tribalism is presented as no worse than modern European civilization, personified by Kurtz. Conrad seems to imply that what Imperial Rome once did to northern Europe, Europe was doing to its worldwide colonial empire.

Writing at the apex of European colonialism, Conrad examined the inner psychology of both colonial overseers and subjects. Primarily seen in his own time as a writer of adventure stories, Conrad is now recognized as a master of narrative technique and English prose (astonishing given that English was his third language), whose work displays a deep moral consciousness. Conrad's penetrating insight, intricate plotting, and dramatization of human character under conditions of extreme danger and difficulty were identified by the influential critic F.R. Leavis as forming a chapter of the "Great Tradition" of English novelists he traced from Jane Austen through George Eliot and Henry James .

Conrad's literary work bridges the gap between the realist literary tradition of writers such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the emergent modernist schools of writing. Although Conrad deploys some of the modernist techniques (most notably, the interior monologue), unlike modernists such as James Joyce , Marcel Proust , or the late Henry James, he still retains forms of a standard, realistic narrative. Nevertheless, his works, like those of other modernists, possess a symbolic resonance and layers of meaning that go beyond the level of the plot.

Conrad has broadly influenced twentieth-century literature, specifically in the works of Graham Greene , André Malraux , and Ernest Hemingway . Several of Conrad's stories have been filmed. The most famous adaptations include Alfred Hitchcock 's The Sabotage (1936), based on The Secret Agent, Richard Brooks's Lord Jim (1964), and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), based on Heart of Darkness.

Heart of Darkness famously served as the basis for Francis Ford Coppola's film about the American experience in Vietnam , Apocalypse Now. The film portrays an officer, (played by Martin Sheen), sent up the Mekong River to kill a rogue Colonel Kurtz, (played by Marlon Brando) who had lost his soul in his effort to beat the Viet Cong at their own style of war, which included terror and torture.

Novels and novellas

Short stories.

• "The Idiots" (Conrad's first short story; written during his honeymoon, published in Savo 1896 and collected in Tales of Unrest , 1898).
• "The Black Mate" (written, according to Conrad, in 1886; published 1908; posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay , 1925).
• "The Lagoon" (composed 1896; published in Cornhill Magazine 1897; collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898).
• "An Outpost of Progress" (written 1896 and named in 1906 by Conrad himself, long after the publication of Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, as his 'best story'; published in Cosmopolis 1897 and collected in Tales of Unrest 1898; often compared to Heart of Darkness , with which it has numerous thematic affinities).
• "The Return" (written circa early 1897; never published in magazine form; collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898; Conrad, presaging the sentiments of most readers, once remarked, "I hate it").
• "Karain: A Memory" (written February–April 1897; published Nov. 1897 in Blackwood's and collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898).
• "Youth" (written in 1898; collected in Youth, a Narrative and Two Other Stories, 1902)
• "Falk" (novella/story, written in early 1901; collected only in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903).
• "Amy Foster" (composed in 1901; published the Illustrated London News , Dec. 1901 and collected in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903).
• "To-morrow" (written early 1902; serialized in Pall Mall Magazine, 1902 and collected in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903).
• "The End of the Tether" (written in 1902; collected in Youth, a Narrative and Two Other Stories, 1902)
• "Gaspar Ruiz" (written after "Nostromo" in 1904–1905|05; published in Strand Magazine in 1906 and collected in A Set of Six, 1908 UK/1915 US. This story was the only piece of Conrad's fiction ever adapted by the author for cinema, as Gaspar the Strong Man , 1920).
• "An Anarchist" (written in late 1905; serialized in Harper's in 1906; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 UK/1915 US.)
• "The Informer" (written before January 1906; published in December 1906 in Harper's and collected in A Set of Six, 1908 UK/1915 US.)
• "The Brute" (written in early 1906; published in The Daily Chronicle in December 1906; collected in A Set of Six , 1908 UK/1915 US.)
• "The Duel" (aka "The Point of Honor": serialized in the UK in Pall Mall Magazine in early 1908 and in the US periodical Forum later that year; collected in A Set of Six in 1908 and published by Garden City Publishing in 1924. Joseph Fouché makes a cameo appearance)
• "Il Conde" (i.e., 'Conte' [count]: appeared in Cassell's [UK] 1908 and Hampton's [US] in 1909; collected in A Set of Six , 1908 UK/1915 US.)
• "The Secret Sharer" (written December 1909; published in Harper's and collected in Twixt Land and Sea 1912)
• "Prince Roman" (written 1910, published in 1911 in the Oxford and Cambridge Review ; based upon the story of Prince Roman Sanguszko of Poland 1800–1881)
• "A Smile of Fortune" (a long story, almost a novella, written in mid-1910; published in London Magazine in Feb. 1911; collected in Twixt Land and Sea 1912)
• "Freya of the Seven Isles" (another near-novella, written late 1910–early 1911; published in Metropolitan Magazine and London Magazine in early 1912 and July 1912, respectively; collected in Twixt Land and Sea 1912)
• "The Partner" (written in 1911; published in Within the Tides , 1915)
• "The Inn of the Two Witches" (written in 1913; published in Within the Tides , 1915)
• "Because of the Dollars" (written in 1914; published in Within the Tides , 1915)
• "The Planter of Malata" (written in 1914; published in Within the Tides , 1915)
• "The Warrior's Soul" (written late 1915–early 1916; published in Land and Water , in March 1917; collected in Tales of Hearsay , 1925)
• "The Tale" (Conrad's only story about WWI; written 1916 and first published 1917 in Strand Magazine )

Memoirs and Essays

• The Mirror of the Sea (collection of autobiographical essays first published in various magazines 1904-1906), 1906
• A Personal Record (also published as Some Reminiscences ), 1912
• Notes on Life and Letters, 1921
• Last Essays, 1926
• ↑ Cora Agatucci, Achebe on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Central Oregon Community College . Retrieved June 14, 2007.

External links

All links retrieved August 10, 2022.

• The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
• Conrad First : a digital archive of every newspaper and magazine in which the work of Joseph Conrad appeared between 1896 and 1935
• Works by Joseph Conrad . Project Gutenberg
• The Secret Agent Free audiobook from LibriVox
• Conrad's page at Literary Journal.com – A number of research articles on Conrad's work

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• Writers and poets

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)

Biography: joseph conrad.

Determined to be a sailor, Conrad left home at 16 and moved to Marseilles, France, where he began his apprenticeship, working entry-level positions on several merchant ships. His career floundered, however, when he learned that to continue this line of work he needed the permission from the Russian consul, who was more likely to conscript Conrad into the Russian army than grant permission. Moreover, Conrad had gambling debts he could not pay. In despair, he wounded himself in the chest in a half-hearted suicide attempt, which prompted his uncle to settle Conrad’s debts and to help him relocate to England. For the next 16 years, Conrad worked in the British mercantile marine, rising in rank to master mariner. In 1886, at the age of 29, he became a British citizen.

In 1890, Conrad captained a steamer up the Congo River, an adventure that inspired Heart of Darkness . As a Pole whose father was a political activist fighting to rebuild a nation ruthlessly conquered by other European powers, Conrad was sensitive to the exploitation and disruption that occurs when one culture will use any means, including aggressive military action, to impose its will upon another. The motive is often the theft of natural resources, such as oil, precious metals, or forests. In Heart of Darkness , it is ivory, valuable in Europe at the time for the manufacture of piano keys, elaborate chess pieces, jewelry, billiard balls, toiletry items, and ornaments of various kinds. Lured by the promise of wealth, adventurers and fortune hunters, with the blessing of Belgium’s King Leopold, who took his cut, rushed to the Congo ready and eager to decimate the elephant population and harvest its ivory. Heart of Darkness was first published in three installments in 1899 in Blackwoods Magazine . In 1902, it was one of the stories in Conrad’s book, Youth, a Narrative, and Two Other Stories . It is among Conrad’s best-known works, and one of the great novellas in the English language.

By 1894, with the help of an inheritance from his uncle, Conrad’s transition from sailor to writer was complete. He married, settled on a farm in Kent, and became a prolific writer, the author of some of the great works of the 20th century: Lord Jim (1899), Typhoon (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911).

The plots of Conrad’s stories often revolve around the relationship between an opinionated but ethical main character—Marlow in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim —and another essentially decent man, tempted and corrupted by the promise of wealth and power. Nostromo, for example, the head of the longshoreman’s union in a South American country in the midst of a revolution, is entrusted because of his reputation as the most brave and honourable of men to protect a shipment of silver, which the mine owner, Charles Gould, fears will fall into the hands of the revolutionaries. The boat in which Nostromo has hidden the silver is rammed by a warship belonging to the revolutionary forces. Nostromo saves and hides the silver on a deserted island, but he claims it sank with his boat. Embittered by his sense that the elite politicians and businessmen of his nation patronize him, Nostromo begins to recover the silver for himself until he is shot and killed by the island’s lighthouse keeper who mistakes Nostromo for an intruder. Such plots, conflicts, and moral dilemmas make for complex stories with the characters developed with considerable psychological intensity, anticipating the work of Conrad’s great successors: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.

Conrad’s style also makes him one of the great novelists of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. His plots are rich and complex, often forsaking a linear narrative in favour of a recursive one, which adds depth and suspense to the story. He did not learn English until he was in his early twenties, and he always spoke with a heavy accent, yet he mastered the vocabulary and the rhythms of the language so thoroughly that the landscapes and the cityscapes that he renders, often in exquisite detail, come to life. His ear for dialogue is equally true.

After 1911, Conrad continued his impressive pace as a novelist and short story writer. Critics generally agree that his best work was behind him, although opinion on the merits of some of his later novels, Chance (1914), Victory (1915), and The Shadow Line (1917), is divided.  Conrad certainly remained a popular novelist, whose works sold well, and who, despite heavy expenses and debts that resulted from a sometimes profligate lifestyle, became a wealthy man. Sales were helped by the stories’ exotic settings and spirit of romantic adventure, which appealed to an ever-growing late-Victorian readership.

Conrad was hard at work, lecturing and writing, until his death in August 1924, with his final novel, Suspense , left unfinished.

Candela Citations

• British Literature: Victorians and Moderns. Authored by : James Sexton. Located at : https://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature . Project : BCcampus Open Textbook Project. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Image of Joseph Conrad. Authored by : George Charles Beresford. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Conrad.PNG . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright