Joseph Conrad

Biography

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (1857-1924) was born in what is now Ukraine to Polish parents under Russian rule. His father was a Polish patriot, exiled to Siberia when Conrad was four; his parents died in exile. Conrad went to sea at seventeen, eventually earning a British merchant captain's certificate and becoming a naturalized British subject in 1886. In 1890, the year of the novella's source voyage, he secured a position with a Belgian company and traveled up the Congo River as a steamboat captain — exactly Marlow's journey. He witnessed firsthand the operations of King Leopold II's Congo Free State, the most murderous colonial enterprise in modern history: an estimated 10 million Congolese killed between 1885 and 1908 through forced labor, amputations, and starvation. Conrad returned from the Congo with his health shattered and his certainties dissolved. Heart of Darkness, published nine years later, is the literary residue of that experience — filtered through a frame, a narrator, and an aesthetic of deliberate ambiguity.

Joseph Conrad at a glance