Joseph Conrad

Orphaned young and raised in a Polish family under Russian rule, he was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857. He went to sea as a teenager, served for years in the French and then British merchant marine, and eventually became a British subject. Those voyages gave him the firsthand knowledge of ships, ports, colonial trade, and isolation that runs through much of his fiction.

He began publishing in English as Joseph Conrad in the 1890s, an extraordinary achievement for a writer working in a language he had not learned from birth. His major books include Almayer's Folly, The Nigger of the "Narcissus", Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and Chance, along with the novella Heart of Darkness.

Conrad's stories often place people under pressure and ask what loyalty, courage, guilt, and responsibility really mean. His dense, atmospheric style and his interest in uncertainty and divided motives made him one of the most influential novelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his work is still widely read, studied, and adapted.