Joseph Conrad – Biography of Joseph Conrad

Joseph conrad, sudonym of JÓzef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, despite being born in Poland (in Berdichev on December 3, 1857), he is in fact considered an English writer. His family belonged to the landed aristocracy of Poland, at that time under Russian rule. The father, a patriot and man of letters, died in 1867, after many years of political exile (the mother had died in 1865). Entrusted to the guardianship of an uncle, the young Conrad he completed his secondary education in Krakow.

At the age of seventeen, driven by an irresistible vocation towards maritime life, he left for Marseilles, where he embarked as a simple sailor. Sailing meant for him to know everything about the seafaring world that was identified with traffic, smuggling, the men who embarked to escape some kind of crime or guilt. In short, it meant finding a world that was not only geographically at the antipodes of civilized Europe. After many years of experience he put himself in the service of the French merchant marine and, from 1878, in the British navy in the United Kingdom, where he reached the rank of Captain. In 1886 he became a British citizen.

For two decades he traveled almost all seas, but especially the Malay archipelago. The success obtained from his first novel, “Almayer’s madness“and the impulse that some writers gave him (Galsworthy, HG Wells, Ford Madox Ford, Edward Gamett) led him to leave the Navy and settle in Great Britain, to dedicate himself entirely to literary activity.

More unique than rare case, Conrad he became a master of literary writing in a language that was not his own, learned as a grown man. Its basic theme was the loneliness of the individual, at the mercy of the blind blows of fate, where the sea is often chosen as a symbol. The lonely hero of Joseph conrad he is almost always a fugitive or an outcast, marked by misfortune or remorse, a close relative of the fallen angel, so dear to romantics, that he conquers his identity by stoically facing the trials that fate has reserved for him.

His numerous works include “An outcast from the islands“(1894),”The black of the Narcissus“(1896),”Youth“(1898),”Heart of darkness“(a strong denunciation of colonialism and a novel, which perhaps few know, has been the plot for the Francis Ford Coppola film” Apocalypse Now “),”Typhoon” Y “Lord jim“(1900).

In these works Conrad probes the evolutionary stages of the unconscious that sometimes seem to anticipate the technique of “stream of consciousness“, which after Virginia Woolf and James Joyce would become a literary genre.

After several other posts, he achieved success with “The shadow line“(1917), another masterpiece, which has become the emblem of the difficulty to grow and what this step brings.

Unique and unrepeatable writer, he probed like few of the human soul; Joseph conrad died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924, in Bishopsboume Kent (Ukraine).