Conrad was born in Russian-occupied Poland on December 3, 1857. Although Poland had been a major power in central Europe from the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, the country had been partitioned into German, Austrian, and Russian sectors, and, by the time of Conrad's birth, only Warsaw remained under Polish control. The Poles fought partition and occupation, particularly Russian occupation, with patriotic and religious fervor. Conrad's family on both sides had a history of commitment to the cause of a free Poland; his parents, Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski, were active in the insurrection of 1863. The Russian authorities sentenced the family to exile in Vologda, Russia, then, after two years, to Chernikhov in the Ukraine. When Conrad was five, his mother died from illness worsened by the privations of their exile. Ewa's death plunged Apollo into depression and illness, despite his having gained permission to return to Warsaw. When he died in May of 1869, he was given a public funeral befitting a hero.

Conrad, twelve years old, was put in the care of his mother's younger brother, Tadeusz Bobrowski, a lawyer. Conrad remained under Tadeusz's care until the age of seventeen, when, after two years of importuning his uncle, he was allowed to attend a maritime school in Marseilles. Conrad's four years in Marseilles have received considerable scrutiny because of evidence of his attempted suicide. Conrad himself told his son and friends that he had been shot in the chest during a duel. But Bobrowski, who went to his nephew's rescue, seems plainly to say in a letter to a friend that Conrad had tried to kill himself, as Zdzislaw Najder in Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle and Frederick R. Karl in Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives point out. Biographers speculate that the suicide attempt may have been the result of debts, a foiled love relationship, or disappointed expectations. When Conrad recovered from his injury, he fulfilled his ambition to sail on an English ship, the Mavis, bound for Constantinople.

Conrad spent the next fifteen years on English ships, where he was known among sailors as "Polish Joe." Conrad rose steadily in his profession, passing the required examinations for second mate in 1880, first mate in 1883, and then, on his second try, captain in 1886, the same year he became a naturalized British citizen. In 1890 Conrad accepted a job as commander of a Congo River steamboat owned by a Belgian firm. Once in Africa, he saw extreme examples of imperialistic exploitation, which he described in "Geography and Some Explorers" (included in the collection Last Essays) as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration." When he arrived at the town of Kinshasa after a thirty-six-day overland trek, he found his command had been sunk, but he was given another steamboat and ordered to proceed immediately up the Congo River to rescue Georges Antoine Klein, a valuable company agent who had taken ill. On the return trip the agent died, and Conrad was stalled in Kinshasa, perhaps, as some have theorized, because he did not get on with his superiors. After months fighting fever and dysentery, he returned to Europe, his health wrecked.

During the next five years, Conrad spent less time at sea and committed himself to the life of a writer. In 1894 his guardian, Bobrowski, died. A year later, Conrad published his first novel, Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River, and dedicated it to his uncle. His second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, derived in plot and theme from the first, followed quickly in 1898, a productivity stimulated, perhaps, by Conrad's marriage in 1896 to Jessie George, with whom he had two sons, Borys and John. During his long career as author of English fiction, Conrad wrote three works with Ford Madox Ford, more than a dozen novels, twenty-nine short stories and novellas, two books of essays, two memoirs, and three plays. Conrad died on August 3, 1924. He was buried at the cemetery of St. Thomas Catholic Church in Canterbury, where his tombstone bears a passage from sixteenth-century British poet Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please."

Critics have divided Conrad's canon into three phases. The first phase includes the works from Almayer's Folly through Typhoon (1903). Based squarely on Conrad's experiences in Eastern seas, the early work earned him a reputation as a teller of sea stories. In the middle phase, from Nostromo (1904) to Under Western Eyes (1911), autobiographical elements are either vastly transformed or subordinated to political themes. The late work, from Chance (1913) to the posthumous Suspense (1925), is less coherent as a body than the early or middle work, and it is usually set apart simply on the basis of its alleged inferiority to Conrad's previous writings.

Much of the fiction in Conrad's early phase arose from his experiences as mate on the trading vessel Vidar, on which he sailed from Singapore on several voyages throughout the Malay Archipelago beginning in 1887. The works based on Conrad's life on the Vidar include his first novel, Almayer's Folly, many short stories, and four other novels: An Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim, Victory, and The Rescue. Recognized for its experiments in narrative technique, evocation of place, characterization, and profound exploration of alienation, Almayer's Folly is considered a remarkable first novel.

Almayer's Folly centers on Kaspar Almayer, a Dutch trader at the port of Sambir, holding what had been a very profitable post until Arabs found their way through the thirty miles of the Pantai River channels to the town. Almayer dreams of returning, with his beloved half-caste daughter Nina, to the native land that he has never seen. A third major figure in the tale, Dain Maroola, is a Malay chieftain from Bali, sent out by his father, the Rajah, to secure gunpowder to fight the Dutch. The fourth actor is Tom Lingard, an aging British trader-adventurer. All intensely isolated, these figures are bound together in a "community of hopes and fears." Almayer's hope is riches and escape from the swamps of Sambir (he had married Lingard's adopted Sulu daughter to secure Lingard's fortune). Lingard's hope is to discover a mountain of gold in the Bornean interior, for which project he loses the wealth Almayer had expected. Dain lives to defeat the Dutch and, unknown to Almayer, to carry off his daughter. Lingard disappears into Europe, trying to raise financial backing for his expeditions into the interior. Almayer loses his daughter and all his hopes, which are symbolized by his "folly," a large house he had begun building in better days; he finally turns to opium to forget. Dain and Nina gain one another, but Nina, though in love with Dain, admits to her father before she departs, "No two human beings understand each other. They can understand but their own voices."

In addition to introducing the typical Conradian theme of alienation, Almayer's Folly also displays several techniques that would become characteristic of Conrad's fiction, including experimentation with narrative flashbacks and flashforwards and with the juxtaposition of points of view. The novel's evocation of place is authentic, as are all its minor characters. The work was well received by critics; an anonymous reviewer for Bookman termed it "a remarkable novel where wild nature and strange humanity [are] powerfully portrayed." Conrad's second work, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), which recounts how the Arabs traveled up the Pantai and ruined Lingard's monopoly, received even better press than Almayer's Folly. Both novels, however, are considered minor works.

After he had finished An Outcast of the Islands, Conrad wrote three short stories ("The Idiots," "The Lagoon," "An Outpost of Progress"), and then began The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1898; originally published as The Children of the Sea, 1897). Whereas the earlier novels and tales are derivative, solidly in a tradition of what Conrad called in the work's preface stories of the "white man in the tropics," The Nigger of the "Narcissus" transcends and transforms the sea tale as told by such nineteenth-century writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Marryat, Richard Henry Dana, and Herman Melville. Conrad combined his intimate understanding of life at sea with his vision of "the truth of life," which he also explains in the novel's preface. "Truth," he wrote, is "what is enduring and essential," yet it is also an "appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments." Both absolute and changing, truth is "the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment"; it is "the feeling of unavoidable solidarity. . . which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world." Thus, in Conrad's view, art is an intimation of solidarity forged despite each person's individual loneliness.

Conrad's notion of loneliness is profoundly expressed in The Nigger of the "Narcissus." Ship and sea bind the ship's crew together physically, but each crew member understands only his own voice. The common seamen of the "Narcissus" are for a time bound all the more by the sad, mysterious figure of the black man, James Wait, who "waits" for death and is so frightened of it that he feigns illness. The men take sides with him against the officers when the captain confines Wait to a cabin as punishment for his shamming. This confinement is actually an act of compassion on the captain's part, for he sees that Wait is truly ill. But the order leads to a mutinous moment when the worst of the crew, a scruffy cockney named Donkin, hurls a belaying pin at the captain. The crew is rendered incompetent, divided by its fascination with Wait. Thirty hours of a violent storm restore a sense of solidarity on the ship, but only temporarily. When Wait finally dies, the narrator (an unnamed member of the crew) understands that the bond holding the crew together has been as false as Wait's initial pretense.

Another work based on Conrad's life as a sailor, "Heart of Darkness" (1899 in serial form), is the first of three great works produced by Conrad between 1897 and 1902. The novella is a fictional version of Conrad's Congo experience. An indictment of European imperialism, the work takes much of its descriptive material from a diary Conrad kept during his service in the African interior. The story is told by Marlow, who narrates the events of his journey up the Congo to four companions on a boat on London's Thames River. In the employ of the Belgian government, Marlow is charged with finding and relieving Kurtz, one of Belgium's most profitable ivory traders. Through Marlow's narration, Conrad exposes the brutal exploitation and destruction wreaked by the Belgians on the African country and its people and satirizes such bourgeois European ideals as the work ethic, efficiency, faith, home and family, community, progress, self-restraint, and the processes of law. Small incidents in each stage of Marlow's journey dramatize the corruption of these ideals: a French man-of-war firing into the bush like a toy ship at a continent; black workers left to die in a grove; and an accountant who keeps his books "in apple-pie order" despite the groans of a man dying nearby.

Marlow first learns about Kurtz from several other employees at the central trading station. Kurtz is variously praised as "a first-class agent," a "very remarkable person," and "an emissary of pity, science, progress, and devil knows what else." Marlow overhears the manager describing Kurtz as a Christian soldier who preached that "each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade, of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing." Marlow consequently fixes his hopes upon Kurtz's fabled integrity, but instead of a beacon, Marlow finds a dying man driven insane by his own greedy and murderous behavior.

"Heart of Darkness" appeared first in book form with two other complementary tales--"Youth," in which Conrad introduces Marlow, and "The End of the Tether." The author once described the three works as tales of youth, middle age, and old age. Neither of the other two stories is as respected as "Heart of Darkness," but both are powerful. "Youth" is centered on a simple but gripping and funny incident taking place on the ship Judea. "The End of the Tether," in contrast, is the most pessimistic of Conrad's early works, its protagonist an old, blind captain who commits suicide.

Lord Jim (1900), perhaps Conrad's greatest novel and certainly his best known, is also narrated by Marlow. The first four chapters are told by an anonymous narrator who relates the early life and career of the titular figure. After the initial chapters, the narrative presents Marlow watching the proceedings of a maritime Board of Inquiry, which is probing the conduct of the captain and officers of the Patna. Believing the ship to be sinking, the crew had abandoned the ship and left the eight hundred pilgrims on board to drown. Jim is one of the deserters, and Marlow befriends him. Jim, who never admits guilt, appeals deeply to Marlow as the embodiment of hopeful youth. After the court pronounces Jim's guilt, Marlow obtains several jobs for Jim, each one ending when his involvement in the Patna affair is revealed. Finally Marlow seeks the advice of an old trader and explorer, Stein, who gives Jim charge of a remote but prosperous trading post, Patusan.

There Jim rises to a place of honor. The natives call him "Tuan Jim"--Lord Jim. But Jim fails again with the arrival of the renegade, Gentleman Brown. An escaped convict, Brown intends to ravage the village, but he and his men are trapped by the villagers, who have united under Jim's leadership. Brown, however, makes an instinctive and devastating reference to Jim's past, asking him if he agrees that when "it came to saving one's own life in the dark, one didn't care who else went--three, thirty, three hundred people." Jim lets Brown and his men have an open road back to sea, but the white trader whom Jim has supplanted shows Brown how to ambush a contingent of men led by Jim's best friend, Dain Maroola. When his friend is murdered by Brown, Jim presents himself to Dain's father to be shot.

Using chronological juxtapositions, sudden and rapid jumps in time, and incidents placed within incidents, Conrad designed Lord Jim to sustain pervasive ironies and ambiguities. Thus the telling of the tale is just as much the subject of Lord Jim as are heroism, courage, self- understanding, or the impingement of European ideals upon native peoples. The novel's unresolved ambiguities still fascinate readers.

Typhoon (1902), the last work of Conrad's early period, focuses on the responses of officers to a natural and human crisis. The natural crisis is a typhoon; the human crisis is occasioned by the cargo, a load of coolies returning home with their wages of several years kept in small wooden chests. During the gale, the chests smash and the coolies start a free-for-all. Captain MacWhirr sends in an officer to quell the riot, then devises a way to distribute the cash among the laborers. Typhoon is considered Conrad's best piece of direct, idiomatic prose. In contrast to Lord Jim and "Heart of Darkness," it has a simple, linear narrative structure, each of its five chapters marking off a distinct segment of the tale.

While Conrad's early work typed him as a writer of the sea, the major works of his middle period--Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911)--turn resolutely away from the sea to cities and to the development of political themes that had been implicit but secondary in the early work. Among Conrad scholars, the first two of these novels are rated very highly, and the last also has devoted admirers. But these novels diverged from Conrad's earlier concerns, eliciting criticism from some of his contemporaries. British novelist D. H. Lawrence, for example, thought Under Western Eyes incomprehensible and boring, although he liked Conrad's previous works very much. Nostromo received negatived reviews, except in American newspapers; fourteen years after its publication, Virginia Woolf, in the Times Literary Supplement, called the novel a "rare and magnificent wreck." The judgment would be echoed forty years later by Albert J. Guerard in Conrad the Novelist; for him, Nostromo was "a great but radically defective novel." Not until the 1960s were Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes accorded the esteem they now have among Conrad scholars. Among critics in general, The Secret Agent is greatly admired for the ferocity of its plot and the sustained irony of its tone.

Nostromo is a critique of materialism. Set in Sulaco, a town in the imaginary South American country of Costaguana, the novel illustrates the impact of material interests on individuals and communities. The central characters, Charles Gould and Nostromo, are both aliens in a strange land. Gould is the descendant of two generations of Englishmen settled in Costaguana, Nostromo an Italian sailor come ashore to try his luck. Utilizing new technology, Gould reopens the silver mines that had ruined his father, joining forces with the railway and the steamship company to become the dominant force in the political and economic life of Costaguana. Nostromo rises from laborer to foreman of the dock workers of the steamship company. The central event in the tale is a revolution led by a general of native Indian descent. The courage and resolution of Gould and Nostromo defeat the rebels, but both men's values, critics have argued, have become slightly tainted.

A plot summary of Nostromo looks clearer and simpler than it is. It too is rendered subtle by narrative juxtapositions, but those are of less moment than the vivid stories of the novel's secondary characters, who suffer with Gould and Nostromo in Costaguana. Referring to the narrative methods of Nostromo, Guerard claims that Conrad's techniques are "an important step in that deformalization of the novel which will attract the twentieth century's greatest talents." Yet at the same time, Nostromo seems a nineteenth-century novel, Dickensian in its wealth of character and incident. It looks as much backward to Dickens's Bleak House as forward to William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.

The Secret Agent is a more austere, ironic fiction. Set in London, the novel uses as its central incident the death of an idiot boy named Stevie. Stevie's brother-in-law, Verloc, is a triple agent--working for the police, for the anarchists, and for an unnamed central European power; he uses the code name Agent Delta. As a cover Verloc sells cheap stationery and petty pornography; in this way he has lived for several years, happily married to Stevie's sister, Winnie. But his European paymaster suddenly demands real action from him--a bombing--in order to stir up popular resentment against the anarchists and thus abolish the haven England provides for them. Verloc is outraged at this intrusion into his placid, bourgeois existence, but he has no choice. He obtains the bomb and gives it to Stevie to carry. On the way to the target the boy trips over a root and is blown to bits. When Winnie learns how her brother died, she stabs Verloc, runs off with an anarchist, and commits suicide on the crossing to France.

The final work of Conrad's political phase, Under Western Eyes, is set in Russia and Geneva. Protagonist Razumov, a student who is the illegitimate and unacknowledged son of a Russian official, is implicated in an assassination. He turns over one assassin to the authorities and is sent off to Geneva to act as a double agent, since the revolutionaries believe him to have been an accomplice of the real assassin, Victor Haldin. In Geneva he meets Haldin's sister, falls in love with her, confesses his guilt, and, deafened by a revolutionary who is also a double agent, is run over and maimed for life. The tale's narrator is an English professor of languages who lives in Geneva. His sustained incomprehension of events is interpreted as a study of the differences between the traditions of autocracy and democracy.

Autobiographical information made available in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, particularly the third and fourth volumes, offers important insight into the author's life and state of mind during the early and middle phases of his creative life. The correspondence of Volume III: 1903-1907 covers the significant years in which he produced Typhoon, The Mirror of the Sea, and Tales of Unrest, as well as the novels Nostromo and The Secret Agent in their entirety. Noting the impact of Conrad's chronic financial difficulties on his work, John Halperin writes in Modern Fiction Studies, "[Conrad] seemed to thrive, creatively speaking, on his miseries--almost needing them, it would appear, to prick him into life as an artist."

"I'd rather dream a novel than write it," Conrad confessed in a 1907 letter cited by Halperin, "for the dream of the work is always much more lovely than the reality of the thing in print." John Batchelor comments in Review of English Studies on the noticeable disparity between the tenderness of Conrad's fictional characters and the author's actual insensitivity. "In his own relationships with friends in life," Batchelor observes, "the letter-writer can seem manipulative, mendacious, whingeing, disloyal, money-grubbing, and parasitical. The contradiction is resolved, I think, when one reflects that for Conrad, as for other men of genius, human relationships were subordinated to the work, the object of his creative drive."

The contents of Volume IV: 1908-1911 reveal circumstances behind the less fertile years in which he composed Under Western Eyes, "The Secret Sharer," and Chance. Conrad suffered several breakdowns during this period, and both the quantity and quality of his writing began to taper. As Halperin notes, "this is the period sometimes described by Conrad scholars as the beginning of his `decline' as a writer of fiction." Prone to severe bouts of depression, "In some moods composition, for him, was no less terrifying than death, and regarded with perhaps even greater loathing," writes Halperin. Praising The Collected Letters series as "excellent and indispensable," Batchelor concludes that the publication of "Conrad's letters continues to make available a huge body of work which greatly extends our knowledge both of Conrad's life and (a slightly different matter) of his literary identity."

The work of Conrad's third and last period is much less thematically unified than the work of the earlier phases. Marlow appears again in the 1913 novel Chance and tells the tale of Flora DeBarral, daughter of a ruined financier, and her lover, Captain Anthony. Victory (1915) relates the story of another pair of lovers, Axel Heyst and Lena. The first novel ends happily for the lovers; the second, set in the East of Lord Jim, ends with Lena's death from a gun shot and Heyst's suicide. In 1920, Conrad published a novel that he had begun in 1897 as a sequel to Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. Originally titled "The Rescuer," The Rescue portrays Lingard's love for a married woman, Edith Travers, a love that destroys his plans to help a native friend regain his land.

All of the work in Conrad's third phase looks, in part, to the past. In 1919 Conrad looked back even farther, to his days in Marseilles, for material for The Arrow of Gold, in which love is found and lost amid intrigue, duels, and gunrunning. Conrad set his last two novels, The Rover (1923) and the incomplete Suspense (1925), during the Napoleonic Wars. He had wanted to write an historical novel for many years, a desire that was perhaps an outgrowth of his lifelong preoccupation with the individual's relationship to history. In The Rover Conrad creates an optimistic tale, with an elderly seaman as its protagonist.

Although the claim is rarely made that any one of these last works is the equal of Lord Jim or Nostromo, critical debate about the intrinsic merits of Chance, Victory, and The Rescue has been intense. Thomas Moser's Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline focuses the debate about the later works. Moser put the issue in uncompromising terms: for him, the work after "The Secret Sharer" (1912) shows "the degeneration of Conrad's prose style." Victory is "utterly inferior" to Nostromo, the critic declared. Moser blames the falling off on Conrad's turning to "love stories, the intended meanings of which ran counter to the deepest impulses of his being." "Love"--that is, female sexuality--was for Conrad the "uncongenial subject," Moser contended. John Palmer, however, in Joseph Conrad's Fiction: A Study in Literary Growth, argued that Moser and others ignored or misread the subtle and complex ironies in Chance, Victory, and The Rescue. The later works, for Palmer, must be seen as ironic allegories in which Conrad grows both in thought and in technical virtuosity. But there is, nonetheless, a consensus that Conrad's greatest achievements in fiction came between 1897 and 1907, in such works as The Nigger of the "Narcissus,", "Heart of Darkness," Lord Jim, and The Secret Agent, in which he experimented with innovative narrative techniques in order to explore the mysterious, elemental passions of human existence.

The publication of The Collected Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad, conscientiously edited and introduced by Samuel Hynes, brings together thirty-one chronologically arranged stories and tales in four volumes, including minor works alongside such masterpieces as "Heart of Darkness." 

source:  Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003.