Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924), was a Polish-born author who wrote in English. He became famous for the novels and short stories that he wrote about the sea.
Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski on Dec. 3, 1857, in Berdichev, in what was then Russian Poland (now Berdychiv, Ukraine). He left Poland at the age of 16 and arrived in England at the age of 20, unable to speak English. During the next 16 years, he worked his way up from deck hand to captain in the British Merchant Navy. He mastered English so completely that he was able to write some of its greatest novels. Conrad’s rich prose style is noted for its gripping intensity, which can be precise in its realism or filled with metaphor.
Conrad used experiences of his life in many of his works. From his voyages in the Indian Ocean and Malay Archipelago came some of his best-known novels. He began with Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), both set in Borneo.
Such later masterpieces as The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), Lord Jim (1900), Typhoon (1903), and The Shadow Line (1917) are also set in the eastern seas. Several of Conrad’s short stories, including “The Secret Sharer” and “Youth,” are set there, too. “Heart of Darkness” is based on his voyage up the Congo River, and his novel Nostromo (1904) uses memories of his early voyages in the Caribbean.
Conrad’s sea stories were not superficial adventure tales, though they were sometimes dismissed as such in his day. Later critics hailed Conrad for his experiments with fictional point of view and multiple narrators. Conrad’s work is also exceptional for its probing psychological analysis of the isolated self torn between such conflicting influences as sympathy and greed, heroism and cowardice, and idealism and cynicism. In Nostromo, for example, Conrad presented an epic picture of the clash between capitalism and revolution in South America. Conrad also wrote two absorbing novels about revolutionaries in Europe, The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911), and the autobiographical pieces collected in The Mirror of the Sea (1906) and A Personal Record (1912). After years of praise from critics but little public attention, Conrad only began to achieve popular success with the more melodramatic material of his novels Chance (1914) and Victory (1915). Conrad died on Aug. 3, 1924.
See also Heart of Darkness.
