Joseph Conrad

Hugh Walpole's study of Joseph Conrad begins with a striking claim: Conrad's art cannot be separated from the life that formed it. Born in the Ukraine, orphaned and exiled from Poland, educated in Cracow, and finally drawn to the sea, Conrad passed through three shaping worlds—Polish oppression, maritime freedom and discipline, and the quiet stability of England. Walpole sees these experiences as the emotional tensions behind all his fiction, and the sea as the great school in which Conrad learned duty, restraint, loyalty, and how to turn memory into art. The book traces Conrad's career from early struggle, when English was still a second language and novels like Almayer's Folly and The Outcast of the Islands showed both promise and heaviness, to the refined mastery of The N****r of the Narcissus, Lord Jim, Youth, Heart of Darkness, Typhoon, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Chance, and Victory. Walpole also offers a vivid portrait of Conrad himself in Some Reminiscences and The Mirror of the Sea: intimate, digressive, skeptical, and deeply devoted to ships, sailors, and the majestic cruelty of the sea. Across the fiction, Conrad emerges as a writer of solemn irony, haunted by the unequal struggle between steadfast human beings and overwhelming forces of fate, corruption, nature, and death. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.