Joseph Conrad

Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857 in Berdichev, Ukraine, in the former Russian Empire and what is now Berdychiv, Ukraine, Joseph Conrad was an English-Polish mariner and novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent. His most well-known and enduring works include Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907), and the novella The Heart of Darkness (1902).

Apollo Korzeniowski, Conrad's father.

Joseph Conrad was born to parents Apollo and Evelina Korzeniowski, both of whom were members of the Polish noble class, and were Polish patriots who conspired against Russian rule. As a consequence to their activities against the Russian Empire, the family was arrested and sent to live in the Russian province of Volgoda when Joseph was four years old. When his parents died several years later, Joseph was raised by an uncle in Poland. Based on this early childhood, Conrad's education was erratic. He was tutored by his father, who had a literary history, before he attended school in Krakow and received further private schooling while living with his uncle.

At the age of sixteen, Conrad left Poland and traveled to the port city of Marseilles, France, where he worked to have a career as a mariner. There, he began apprenticeships, working entry-level positions on merchant ships, but found a roadblock as he worked to be promoted in his career. He found that to continue the work, he would need permission from the Russian consul, who was considered to be more likely to conscript the young Conrad into the Russian army as to grant him permission to continue in the French merchant navy.

Tadeusz Bobrowski, Conrad's maternal uncle.

During this time, it has been suggested that Joseph Conrad was working to ship arms for a pretender to the Spanish throne, Don Carlos. And during the shipping of arms, there has been a rumored affair with a young woman who was a sympathizer of Don Carlos. The affair ended in a duel with an American named J.M.K. Blunt. This affair, along with the roadblocks in Conrad's early career, and mounting gambling debts that were beyond Conrad being able to pay, led Joseph Conrad to wound himself in the chest, in what was described as a half-hearted suicide attempt. This prompted Conrad's uncle to settle the young man's debts and relocate him to England.

In 1878, Conrad moved to England and began working on English ships as an officer in the British merchant service. This has been considered important part of Conrad's life, as his voyages took him to Australia, India, Singapore, Java, and Borneo which became backgrounds for much of his fiction. Further, during this period, he rose in rank from second mate to master. In 1881, Conrad received a position aboard the Palestine and went on a voyage that served as a backdrop for some works. During his voyage, the Palestine suffered damage from gales, was accidentally rammed by a steamer, and saw desertions from a sizable number of the crew before the cargo of coal caught fire. Conrad escaped the burning ship and landed on an island off Sumatra.

In 1883, Conrad received a commission as mate aboard the Riverside, which he left at Madras to join the Narcissus at Bombay. This commission gave him further material for more novels. In 1886, Conrad became a British subject and obtained his master mariner's certificate. Following this, in 1887, Conrad sailed on the Highland Forest, bound for Semarang, Java. The Highland Forest's captain was John McWhirr, whom Conrad later wrote in under the same name as the heroic, unimaginative captain in the novel Typhoon. He then joined the Vidar, which traded among the islands of the southeast Asian archipelago, a world later recreated in his novels.

After leaving the Vidar, Conrad received his first command, on the Otago, sailing from Bangkok. This command was given after the previous captain had died at sea. By the time the ship reached Singapore, they had suffered from a lack of wind, and the ship's company except Conrad and the cook, was down fever. Conrad returned to England, where he waited for another command, and during this time he began writing his first novel. Before he finished, he was given command of a Congo River steamboat. This became the backdrop for his novella Heart of Darkness. During his time on the steamboat, Conrad was said to have suffered psychological, spiritual, and metaphysical shock, with his physical health being damaged and experiencing recurrent fever and gout for the rest of his life.

In 1894, Conrad settled in England and finished writing his first novel Almayer's Folly, which was published in 1895. In 1896, Conrad married Jessie Emmeline George, a daughter of a bookseller, with which he had two sons. He also enjoyed friendships with contemporary authors such as John Galsworthy, Ford Madox Ford, and H.G. Wells. Before 1900, Conrad wrote two of his most enduring and famous novels: Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.

Both of these novels contained signature elements of Conrad's writing: faraway settings; dramatic conflicts between human characters and the forces of nature; and themes of individualism, the violent side of human nature, and racial prejudice. Conrad's work tends to explore "psycho-political" situations that draw parallels between the lives of single characters in the broader sweep of human history.

Conrad continued to achieve success as an author, publishing novels such as Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes, which tended to be more political in focus. Following this, Conrad published Chance in 1914 and Victory in 1915, which are considered the last important novels the author published; both of these study the themes of solitude and sympathy. In the case of Chance, the novel was a huge financial success that allowed Conrad to live the rest of his life without money worries.

Joseph Conrad's last novels, The Shadow Line (1917) and The Rover (1923), were written as farewells. In 1923, he traveled to the United States to great fanfare. While, in 1924, Conrad declined an offer of knighthood in England. In August of 1924, Conrad died of a heart attack. Joseph Conrad was buried at Canterbury, England.

During his lifetime, Joseph Conrad was admired for the richness of his prose and renderings of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places. His initial reputation as a masterful teller of colorful adventures of the sea masked his fascination with the individual when faced with nature's invariable unconcern, man's frequent malevolence, and his inner battles with good and evil. And to Conrad, often the sea was meant to represent the tragedy of loneliness. Due to this, along with some of the complex skills and insights of his work, Conrad has been increasingly regarded as one of the greater English novelists.

Although many consider Conrad's best work to have come before 1911, opinion on the merits of some of his later works remains divided. Joseph Conrad was a popular novelist, and over time and despite his expenses and debts, he became a wealthy man. Often these novel sales were helped by an ever-growing late-Victorian readership that enjoyed novels with an exotic setting and a spirit of romantic adventure.

Of the many themes that occur throughout Conrad's work, the themes of moral and national responsibility, fidelity and betrayal, honor and shame, duty and escape are frequent. There is also a general presence of important elements of Polish literature—the Polish language left its mark on Conrad's prose, often in the form of Polonisms (words and idioms used in their Polish rather than English sense). However, the influence of the Polish language also occurred in the occasional errors in the use of tenses, and an infrequent looseness of syntax.

Others consider Conrad's rhetorical, rolling rhythm in his prose able of being traced to the influence of Polish. Further, through the 1920s and 1930s, Conrad's popularity in Poland increased, and his work largely reached peak popularity during World War II, during a period where his works, especially Lord Jim, were said to have served as moral authority for young members of the Polish underground army and civil resistance.

Joseph Conrad's work has largely been considered to be in the category of contemporary writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy, where there is a link between old and new literatures, and the author acts as a harbinger of literature to come. For example, Joseph Conrad's work is often considered as a link between realist writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the emerging modern schools of writing, which included writers such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, or Henry James. This is, in part, because of Conrad's use of interior monologue, largely considered a modernist technique, while retaining the form of a standard, realistic narrative.

Conrad's work has also been broadly influential on 20th century literature, especially in the works of Graham Greene, André Malraux, and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few. And his works have been adapted into films, with some famous adaptations including Alfred Hitchcock's The Sabotage (1936), Richard Brooks's Lord Jim (1964), and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979).

Joseph Conrad's work has also received criticism in its legacy. Some of that has come from near contemporaries, such as Virginia Woolf or Vladimir Nabokov, who have found the settings of Conrad's adventures as romantic clichés largely irrelevant to contemporary life. Or later criticism, such as that from Chinua Achebe, who has argued that Conrad's language and imagery throughout his work is inescapably racist, especially in his early novels, which show little to no insight into the natives he describes.

This is partially based on Conrad's association of the natives with the wild, which he further associated with despair, death, and savage, inhuman acts. However, others have noted that his depiction of London and industrial man offers a similarly gloomy picture; and these criticism may miss how critical Conrad was of contemporary civilization, and what he considered to be a racist imperialism of Europeans throughout Heart of Darkness.