Heart of Darkness is the finest of all Conrad's tales, showing him at the height of his powers as a writer of great vividness, intensity, and sophistication. The story has come to be regarded as classic of the twentieth century. Its ambiguity has made it the subject of numerous interpretations.
The tale appraises the glamour, folly and rapacity of imperial adventure. It gives ironic insights into human nature and the bases of civilization.
Sitting on board a ship anchored in the lower reaches of the River Thames, Marlow, an officer in the merchant navy, tells a group of his friends the story of his journey up the Congo River in Africa, in the employment of a Belgian trading company. This supposedly benevolent organization is in fact ruthlessly enslaving the Africans and depleting the area of ivory. At the company's Central Station he hears of the remarkable agent Mr. Kurtz who is stationed in the very heart of the ivory country. Marlow sets of on an arduous journey to the Inner Station up river where he expects to meet Mr. Kurtz...
Joseph Conrad (originally Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski) was born in Russian-dominated Ukraine in 1857. His parents were punished by the Russians for their Polish nationalist activities and both died while Conrad was still a child. Conrad grew under the care of his uncle, Thaddeus Bobrowski, who was to be a continuing influence on his life. From an early age he longed to go to sea and in 1874 he travelled to Marseilles where he joined the merchant marine as an apprentice. His career as a sailor provided much of the material for his writing. In 1886 he became a British subject and a master mariner. In 1894, after twenty years at sea, he settled in England and devoted himself to writing.
In 1895 Conrad married Jessie George, by whom he was to have two sons, and his novel Almayer’s Folly appeared in the same year. The long subsequent series of novels, tales, essays and reminiscences established Conrad in the front rank of creative writers. Among his many other books are An Outcast of the Islands (1896), The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), Typhoon (1902), Youth (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Mirror of the Sea (1906), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Chance (1913), Victory (1915), The Shadow Line (1917), The Rescue (1920) and The Rover (1923). He also collaborated with Ford Madox Ford on two books, The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). His autobiography, A Personal Record, appeared in book form in 1912 and his unfinished novel Suspense was published in 1925. He died in 1924 at his home near Canterbury.
Despite the immediate critical recognition that novels of Conrad received in his lifetime, his major novels did not sell, and he lived in relative poverty until the commercial success of Chance (1913) secured for him a wider public and an assured income. In 1923 he visited America, with great acclaim, and was offered a knighthood (which he declined). Since then his reputation has steadily grown and now he is recognised as a writer who revolutionized the English novel and was arguably the most important single innovator of the twentieth century.
