Novelist, born in Berdichev, WC Ukraine. He joined the British merchant navy, and became a British national in 1886. He sailed to many parts of the world, married in 1896, and settled in Ashford, Kent. His first novel was Almayer's Folly (1895). His best-known works are The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), and Chance (1914). He also wrote many short stories; and the short novel Heart of Darkness (1902) anticipates many 20th-c themes and effects. His fiction has been a favourite subject for film and television adaptation.
Some of his works have been labelled romantic, although Conrad's romanticism is tempered with irony and a fine sense of man's capacity for self-deception.Many critics regard Conrad as a forerunner of modernism.
Conrad's narrativistic style and existential, anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, DH Lawrence, Graham Greene, Joseph Heller and Jerzy Kosiński, as well as inspiring such films as Apocalypse Now (which was based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness).
Youth
Conrad was born Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski (help·info) in Berdyczów (now Berdychiv, Ukraine), into a highly-patriotic landowning Polish family bearing the Nałęcz coat-of-arms. Conrad's father was a writer best known for patriotic tragedies, and a translator of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo from English and French. Conrad's mother died there of tuberculosis in 1865, and his father died four years later in Kraków, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven.
Young Conrad was placed in the care of his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, in Kraków—a more cautious figure than his parents. Bobrowski nevertheless allowed Conrad to travel to Marseille and begin a career as a seaman at the age of 16. This came after Conrad was rejected for Austro-Hungarian citizenship, leaving him liable for 25-year conscription into the Russian Army.
Voyages
Conrad lived an adventurous life, becoming involved in gunrunning and political conspiracy, which he later fictionalized in his novel The Arrow of Gold, and apparently had a disastrous love affair, which plunged him into despair.
In 1878, after a failed suicide attempt, Conrad took service on his first British ship bound for Constantinople, before its return to Lowestoft, his first landing in Britain. He did not become fluent in English until the age of 21, and in 1886 gained both his Master Mariner's certificate and British citizenship, officially changing his name to "Joseph Conrad."
Conrad was to serve a total of sixteen years in the British merchant marine, with passages to the Far East, where his ship caught fire off Sumatra and he spent more than twelve hours hours in a lifeboat.
A childhood ambition to visit central Africa was realised in 1889, when Conrad contrived to reach the Congo Free State.
The description of Conrad's protagonist Marlow's journey upriver closely follows Conrad's own, and he appears to have experienced a disturbing insight into the nature of evil. Conrad's experience of loneliness at sea, of corruption and of the pitilessness of nature converged to form a coherent, if bleak, vision of the world. Conrad's own sense of loneliness throughout his exile's life would find memorable expression in the 1901 short story, "Amy Foster."
Notwithstanding the undoubted sufferings that Conrad endured on many of his voyages, he contrived to put up at the best lodgings at many of his destinations.
Conrad is also reported to have stayed at Hong Kong's Peninsula Hotel. No Caribbean resort is yet known to have claimed Conrad's patronage, although he is believed to have stayed at a Fort-de-France pension upon arrival in Martinique on his first voyage, in 1875, when he travelled as a passenger on the Mont Blanc.
Emotional development
A further insight into Conrad's emotional life is provided by an episode which inspired one of his strangest and least known stories, "A Smile of Fortune." While it is evident that Conrad too fell in love while in Mauritius, it was not with Alice. Conrad left broken-hearted, vowing never to return.
Novelist
In 1894, aged 36, Conrad left the sea to become an English-language author. With its successor, An Outcast of the Islands, it laid the foundations of a reputation as a romantic teller of exotic tales, a misunderstanding of his purpose that was to frustrate Conrad for the rest of his career. Conrad's health remained poor for the remainder of his life, although he continued to work relentlessly. In 1923, the year before his death, Conrad, who possessed a hereditary Polish coat-of-arms, declined the offer of a British knighthood (which is not hereditary).
Joseph Conrad died 3 August 1924, of a heart attack, and was interred at Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, England, under the name of Korzeniowski. Arguably the most influential work remains Heart of Darkness, to which many have been introduced by Francis Ford Coppola's film, Apocalypse Now, inspired by Conrad's novella and set during the Vietnam War.
Style
Conrad, an emotional man subject to fits of depression, self-doubt and pessimism, disciplined his romantic temperament with an unsparing moral judgment.
As an artist, he famously aspired, in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel...
Writing in what to the visual arts was the age of Impressionism, Conrad showed himself in many of his works a prose poet of the highest order: thus, for instance, in the evocative Patna and courtroom scenes of Lord Jim;
The singularity of the universe depicted in Conrad's novels, especially compared to those of near-contemporaries like John Galsworthy, is such as to open him to criticism similar to that later applied to Graham Greene. But where "Greeneland" has been characterised as a recurring and recognisable atmosphere independent of setting, Conrad is at pains to create a sense of place, be it aboard ship or in a remote village.
In the view of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, it was not until the first volumes of Anthony Powell's sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, were published in the 1950s, that an English novelist achieved the same command of atmosphere and precision of language with consistency, a view supported by present-day critics like A. This is the more remarkable, given that English was Conrad's third language. Powell acknowleged his debt to Conrad.
Conrad's third language remained inescapably under the influence of his first two — Polish and French. Lawrence, one of many men of letters whom Conrad befriended, offered some perceptive observations about Conrad's writing:
He's absolutely the most haunting thing in prose that ever was: I wish I knew how every paragraph he writes (...In Conrad's time, literary critics, while usually commenting favorably on his works, often remarked that his exotic style, complex narration, profound themes and pessimistic ideas put many readers off. Yet as Conrad's ideas were borne out by 20th-century events, in due course he came to be admired for beliefs that seemed to accord with subsequent times more closely than with his own.
Conrad's was, indeed, a starkly lucid view of the human condition — a vision similar to that which had been offered in two micro-stories by his ten-years-older Polish compatriot, Bolesław Prus (whose work Conrad admired): "Mold of the Earth" (1884) and "Shades" (1885). Conrad wrote:
Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore;Novels and novellas
| 1895 | Almayer's Folly |
| 1896 | An Outcast of the Islands |
| 1897 | The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' |
| 1899 | Heart of Darkness |
| 1900 | Lord Jim |
| 1901 | The Inheritors (with Ford Madox Ford) |
| 1902 | Typhoon (begun 1899) |
| 1903 | Romance (with Ford Madox Ford) |
| 1904 | Nostromo |
| 1907 | The Secret Agent |
| 1911 | Under Western Eyes |
| 1912 | Freya of the Seven Isles |
| 1913 | Chance |
| 1915 | Victory |
| 1917 | The Shadow Line |
| 1919 | The Arrow of Gold |
| 1920 | The Rescue |
| 1923 | The Nature of a Crime (with Ford Madox Ford) |
| The Rover | |
| 1925 | Suspense (unfinished, published posthumously) |
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