Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Korzeniowski in Russian Poland, the son of an exiled patriot, went to sea at sixteen, spent twenty years in the French and British merchant marine, and began writing in English, his third language, at thirty-seven. Heart of Darkness, from a journey up the Congo that nearly killed him, follows Marlow into the interior in search of the trader Kurtz, and has been read as an indictment of empire and, by Achebe, as a symptom of it. Lord Jim, Nostromo and The Secret Agent followed. He wrote slowly and in pain, and is the great novelist of solitude and duty.