Joseph Conrad

Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, in Berdychiv, then part of the Russian Empire. His Polish parents were involved in the movement for national independence; his father was arrested and the family was exiled. Both parents died while Conrad was still a child, leaving him to be raised by an uncle.

He went to sea as a teenager, first from Marseille and later in the British merchant service. English was his third language, acquired after Polish and French, yet it became the language of the fiction he began publishing in his thirties. He qualified as a master mariner and became a British subject in 1886. A voyage to the Congo in 1890 damaged his health and furnished the experience behind Heart of Darkness.

Conrad left the sea, settled in England and wrote about divided loyalties, imperial power and people tested past the point where their civilized explanations hold. Lord Jim, Nostromo and The Secret Agent moved that pressure from ships and colonies into courts, companies and London streets. The Secret Agent drew on the real Greenwich bombing of 1894 but transformed it into a study of a family destroyed by political manipulation. Success came slowly and money was often tight. Conrad died in Kent in 1924, one of the central modern novelists in a language he had not grown up speaking.