Part of Series
There are few men who can truly be described as titans of literature. Joseph Conrad is one of them. From humble beginnings as the son of a dissident in Poland, to a life of adventure on the far corners of the globe, to at last a dignified position as an elder statesman of the English literary community, Conrad’s personal story is as engaging as his writing. It seems both Conrad’s life and his writing have sadly fallen from the public eye today. Conrad was, rightly, the most talked-about writer on the planet for decades during and after his life. His incredible stories and the characters in them captured the human condition with a degree technical and artistic perfection often imitated but never full captured again. This volume provides an introduction to Conrad’s work for a new generation of readers. Inside are five of Conrad’s best and most well-known stories, including Typhoon, The Secret Sharer, and Heart of Darkness, that offer a brief look into the world of Conrad. For casual and dedicated readers alike, Conrad’s writing is insightful, entertaining, challenging, and, above all, unforgettable.
Author
Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski ) was a Polish-born English novelist who today is most famous for Heart of Darkness, his fictionalized account of Colonial Africa. Conrad left his native Poland in his middle teens to avoid conscription into the Russian Army. He joined the French Merchant Marine and briefly employed himself as a wartime gunrunner. He then began to work aboard British ships, learning English from his shipmates. He was made a Master Mariner, and served more than sixteen years before an event inspired him to try his hand at writing. He was hired to take a steamship into Africa, and according to Conrad, the experience of seeing firsthand the horrors of colonial rule left him a changed man. Joseph Conrad settled in England in 1894, the year before he published his first novel. He was deeply interested in a small number of writers both in French and English whose work he studied carefully. This was useful when, because a need to come to terms with his experience, lead him to write Heart of Darkness, in 1899, which was followed by other fictionalized explorations of his life. He has been lauded as one of the most powerful, insightful, and disturbing novelists in the English canon despite coming to English later in life, which allowed him to combine it with the sensibilities of French, Russian, and Polish literature.
