Joseph Conrad

A leading figure in English Modernist literature and author of some of the finest English novels and short stories of the early 20th century, Joseph Conrad was born Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 in what was then Poland under Russian imperial rule and is now part of Ukraine. It was nearly three decades later, after years at sea, that Conrad settled in England and began his literary career. ...

Conrad’s father was a Polish patriot, at odds with the Russian regime; he was arrested and sent into exile, with his young family, in northern Russia. Jósef’s mother died in exile; his father died soon after their return to Poland. Cared for by an uncle, Jósef was sent to a school in Switzerland, but he longed to go to sea and in 1874 he arrived in Marseilles and joined the Mont-Blanc sailing to Martinique. A few years later he signed to a British ship to avoid French conscription and in 1886 became both a Master Mariner and a British citizen.

As a sailor, Conrad travelled the world and experienced the highs and lows of life at sea – even surviving in an open boat after the crew abandoned a burning coal ship – but a long-cherished ambition was fulfilled in 1889 when he was given command of a Congo River steamboat. That journey was the inspiration for his celebrated novella, Heart of Darkness, but most of Conrad’s fiction draws on his deep knowledge of the sea and its intense challenge to the individual.

Conrad settled in England, married and, after 20 years at sea, took up a new career as a writer. In the early 20th century he produced novels that were to influence generations of writers and are now recognized classics of modernist literature – Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1902), Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907). The books were received as good stories set in exotic surroundings by Conrad’s contemporaries; much later, readers began to value Conrad’s exploration of the individual facing the forces of nature and the inner struggle of good versus evil.

Conrad had financial troubles for many years, but Chance was a popular success in 1913, and his fortunes and his reputation as an innovative and insightful writer improved in his later years: he was awarded a Civil List pension and offered a knighthood, which he refused. He died in 1924.