Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born British novelist whose fiction drew on his experience in the French and British merchant navies. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 in what is now Ukraine, he grew up within the Polish patriotic tradition and later went to sea, travelling through Europe, Asia, Africa and the Pacific. English was his third language, yet he became one of the major prose stylists of English literature. His novels and stories frequently examine imperialism, commerce, political violence, divided loyalties and the moral pressures placed on individuals operating far from familiar institutions. He became a British citizen in 1886 and died in 1924.

Many of Conrad’s works now function as historical fiction or as vivid records of the late nineteenth-century imperial world. Heart of Darkness exposes the violence and exploitation of European colonialism in the Congo, while Lord Jim and An Outcast of the Islands explore maritime trade, colonial outposts and personal failure in Southeast Asia. Nostromo is set in the fictional South American republic of Costaguana and examines revolution, foreign investment and political corruption, while The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes turn to anarchism, surveillance and revolutionary politics in Europe and Russia. Although most were contemporary novels when written, they provide important insight into empire, global shipping, commercial expansion and political unrest around the turn of the twentieth century.