Heart of Darkness

JOSEPH CONRAD was born in Polish Ukraine on December 3, 1857, with the name Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. Orphaned at the age of eleven, Conrad spent the remainder of his youth in Switzerland and Cracow before joining the French marines. In 1878, he enlisted in the British Merchant Navy. Following sixteen years of service, Conrad launched his literary career in England. He published many novels and stories, including Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and most famously, The Heart of Darkness (1899), inspired by his steamboat voyage on the Congo River. Although English was his third language (after Polish and French), Conrad’s rich and distinctive prose established him as one of England’s greatest novelists. Conrad died on August 3, 1924, in Kent, England. Paul B. Armstrong is Professor of English and former Dean of the College at Brown University. He was previously a professor and a dean at the University of Oregon and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has also taught at the University of Copenhagen, Georgia Institute of Technology, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Virginia, and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. He is the author of How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art; Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form; Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation; The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford; and The Phenomenology of Henry James. He is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of E. M. Forster’s Howards End and of the fourth and fifth Norton Critical Editions of Heart of Darkness.