Joseph Conrad, 1857 - 1924

Joseph Conrad ( Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) was born in Berdichev, Ukraine (1857), in a region that had once been part of Poland. His father was a poet and translator of English and French literature. Joseph and his father read books written in both Polish and French. By the time he was 12 years old, both of his parents had died of tuberculosis. He went to Switzerland to live with his uncle, but after a few years he decided he wanted to go off and see the world. He joined the French merchant marine, and began a long career as a sailor. He sailed to Australia, Borneo, Malaysia, South America, the South Pacific, and Africa. He joined the British merchant navy, and in 1886 became a citizen of Great Britain.

In the fall of 1889, Conrad settled in London for a few months. One morning, after he finished his breakfast, he told his maid to clear away all the dishes immediately. Normally, he would sit by the window and read from a book by Dickens or Hugo or Shakespeare. But on this morning he felt unusually calm and perceptive. He later wrote, "It was an autumn day . . . with fiery points and flashes of red sunlight on the roofs and windows opposite, while the trees of the square with all their leaves gone were like tracings of an Indian ink on a sheet of tissue paper." He began to write his first novel, Almayer's Folly, which would be published six years later. It's about a man from the Netherlands who trades on the jungle rivers of Borneo. Conrad said, "The conception of a planned book was entirely outside my mental range when I sat down to write." He said he felt "a hidden obscure necessity, a completely masked and unaccountable phenomenon."

Conrad went on to write many more novels, including Lord Jim (1900), The Secret Agent (1907), and Nostromo (1904). But he's most famous for Heart of Darkness (1902), about a man's journey down a river into the middle of Africa. Conrad wrote, in Heart of Darkness, "It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence,--that which makes its truth, its meaning-its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream-alone."

Conrad said the task of the writer is "to make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see. That-and no more, and it is everything."