Heart of Darkness

(1899)  Charles Marlow is a river-steamboat captain in England.  He has a new assignment as captain of a river-steamboat for an ivory trading company in the Congo.  As he travels up the Congo River to meet Kurtz, reputed to be an idealistic man of great abilities, he witnesses brutality and hate between colonizers and the native African people, becomes entangled in a power struggle within the Company, and finally learns the truth about the mysterious Kurtz, a mad agent who has become both a god and a prisoner of the "native Africans."