Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [1]
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Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction
ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-123-2 ISBN-10: 1-59308-123-5
eISBN : 978-1-411-43230-7
LC Control Number 2007941531
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JOSEPH CONRAD
Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born on December 3, 1857, in a Polish province in the Ukraine to parents ardently opposed to the Russian occupation of eastern Poland. From his father, Apollo, Conrad developed a great love of literature, and he read the works of James Fen imore Cooper, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Sir Walter Scott in Polish and French translations. After he lost his parents to tuberculosis in 1865 and 1869, Conrad was cared for by his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski until 1874, when he left for Marseilles to launch a career at sea that would span some twenty years. He joined the British merchant marine in 1878, climbing the ranks and passing his captain’s exam in 1886—the same year he became a British subject. Conrad’s many ocean voyages took him all over the world and provided inspiration for his subsequent writing career, but it was his trip up the Congo River on a steamship that left him disenchanted with humanity and that led him to write his seminal work Heart of Darkness (1899). Conrad had begun a decade earlier, at age thirty-one, to compose fiction in English, a language he had not learned until he was a young adult. He published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, in 1895 under the pen name Joseph Conrad and, encouraged by the literary critic Edward Garnett, then devoted himself to writing. Although he suffered from physical ailments, such as malaria, as well as psychological problems, Conrad nonetheless produced a substantial body of work, including the great novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911). He is regarded as one of the premier prose stylists and writers of psychological fiction in the English language. He died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924.
THE WORLD OF JOSEPH CONRAD
1482 The Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão discovers the mouth of a river nearly 3,000 miles long. Europeans initially call it the Zaire, but it later becomes known as the Congo.
1491 Christian missionaries first travel to the Congo.
1853 Scottish missionary-doctor David Livingstone embarks on his Zambezi expedition, one of the most significant explorations of the Congo.
1857 Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski is born in a province in the Russian-occupied Ukraine to Polish parents Ewa (née Bobrowska) and patriot, poet, and translator Apollo Korzeniowski.
1861 Apollo is arrested by the Russian authorities for his nationalist activities.
1862 Apollo is released, and the family is exiled to Vologda, Russia.
1865 Conrad’s mother dies of tuberculosis. Conrad first experiences English literature through his father’s translations of Shakespeare. (His first two languages are Polish and French.)
1869 Conrad’s father dies, also of tuberculosis; Conrad is adopted by his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, who lives in Poland. The completion of the Suez Canal effectively links the Mediterranean and Red Seas.
1874 Conrad sets off for Marseilles to become a seaman in the French merchant marine; his first voyage is to Martinique on the Mont Blanc.
1878 An indebted Conrad attempts suicide by shooting himself in the chest. He subsequently signs on with the British merchant navy. Following Henry Morton Stanley’s exploration of the region, King Leopold II of Belgium claims ownership of the Congo, founding the Comité d‘Etudes du Haut-Congo (later the Associa tion Internationale du Congo); Leopold takes this action pri vately, not on behalf of Belgium.
1881 Conrad sails to the Far East on the Palestine,