Joseph Conrad 1857 – 1924

Biography

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Berdychiv, in what is now Ukraine, to Polish parents, and was orphaned by the age of eleven. He went to sea at sixteen, serving in the French and then the British merchant navies, and did not learn English until his twenties. Yet he became one of the greatest novelists in the English language, drawing on his years at sea for Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Heart of Darkness, his harrowing novella of the Congo that exposed the brutality of colonialism. His dense, psychological prose influenced generations of writers. He settled in England, became a British citizen, and wrote until his final years. He died in Bishopsbourne, Kent, in 1924. His fiction, once admired mainly for adventure, is now read as a profound meditation on empire, guilt, and the limits of language.