Joseph Conrad

Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on 3 December 1857 in Berdychiv, in the Russian-controlled part of partitioned Poland, Joseph Conrad was the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski, a poet, translator, and Polish nationalist whose political activities led to the family’s exile to Vologda in northern Russia when Conrad was four years old. His mother died of tuberculosis in exile in 1865; his father followed in 1869, leaving the eleven-year-old an orphan under the care of his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski. At sixteen, he left Poland for Marseille to join the French merchant marine, and by twenty he was sailing on British ships, eventually earning his master mariner’s certificate in 1886 , the same year he became a British subject. He did not speak English fluently until his twenties and never lost his strong Polish accent, yet he became one of the supreme prose stylists in the English language. His years at sea gave him the settings and moral landscapes of his fiction: Almayer’s Folly (1895), his first novel, was followed by The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Lord Jim (1900), and the devastating novella Heart of Darkness (1899), based on his six-month journey up the Congo River in 1890 , a journey that shattered his health and his faith in European civilization. Nostromo (1904), set in a fictional South American republic, is often considered his most ambitious work. The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911) explored political terrorism and betrayal with a psychological precision that anticipated le Carré. He struggled with depression, debt, and gout throughout his career, writing in what was his third language. He died of a heart attack on 3 August 1924 at his home in Bishopsbourne, Kent.