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Portrait of Joseph Conrad

Literature · Novelists

Joseph Conrad

1857–1924 · Polish-British

Early modernism; sea and colonial fiction

Joseph Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents in the Russian Empire, spent about twenty years at sea before becoming one of the great novelists in English, his third language. His fiction, often narrated by the seaman Charles Marlow, explores moral isolation, imperialism and political violence. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo and The Secret Agent are central texts of early modernism.

How to spot them

  • ▸Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Berdychiv (now Ukraine); wrote in his third language
  • ▸The narrator Marlow; Kurtz and 'The horror! The horror!'
  • ▸A merchant seaman who became a British subject and captained a Congo river steamer in 1890
  • ▸Costaguana and its silver mine (Nostromo); Verloc and the Greenwich bomb plot (The Secret Agent)

Key works

Almayer's Folly (1895)

His first novel, set in Borneo

The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897)

Sea novel whose preface states his aim 'to make you see'

Heart of Darkness (1899 (book 1902))

Marlow's journey up the Congo to find the ivory agent Kurtz

Lord Jim (1900)

A young officer who abandons the pilgrim ship Patna seeks redemption in Patusan

Nostromo (1904)

Revolution and silver in the fictional South American republic of Costaguana

The Secret Agent (1907)

Anarchists in London and Adolf Verloc's plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory

Under Western Eyes (1911)

The student Razumov betrays a revolutionary in Tsarist Russia

Victory (1915)

The detached Axel Heyst on a remote island in the Malay Archipelago

Key ideas

  • Heart of Darkness became the basis of Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now (1979)
  • Chinua Achebe's 1975 lecture 'An Image of Africa' attacked Heart of Darkness as racist, sparking lasting debate
  • The Secret Agent, drawing on a real 1894 explosion near Greenwich Observatory, is often read as a prophetic novel of terrorism

Quick-fire facts

  • •Joined the French merchant marine in 1874 and the British merchant navy in 1878; became a naturalised British subject and gained his master's certificate in 1886
  • •Commanded the Congo river steamer Roi des Belges in 1890, the experience behind Heart of Darkness
  • •English was his third language, after Polish and French
  • •'Mistah Kurtz—he dead' from Heart of Darkness is the epigraph of T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men
  • •Collaborated with Ford Madox Ford on The Inheritors and Romance
  • •Declined a knighthood in 1924; died that year in Kent and is buried in Canterbury
  • •Alfred Hitchcock's film Sabotage (1936) is based on The Secret Agent

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources