"Yanko Goorall", a Polish immigrant en route for America is shipwrecked on the shores of Kent, England. The name he assumes is a corruption of his actual name, Janko Góral, which means "Johnny Highlander" in Polish. Speaking no English, he is treated as a madman and is whipped, stoned, beaten and imprisoned by the locals. Eventually he is given a job by a Mr. Swaffer, learns to speak English, and falls in love with Amy Foster, an English girl who had shown him kindness. The character of Yanko Goorall shares some similarities with Conrad himself. Like Yanko, Conrad too is a Pole living in England, far from his native land. The book is believed to reflect Conrad's own social alienation in English society. The title of a modern movie adaptation of Amy Foster is called "Swept from the Sea", which is how some people may know of this story.
Authors
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.
