Joseph Conrad
1) Nostromo
Heart of Darkness tells the story of Charles Marlow, an English man who journeys into the African jungle. The difference between Conrad's novella and other classic adventure fictions, like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, is that Heart of Darkness goes beyond classic motifs of discovery and exploration to explicitly deal with questions of racism, exploitation and colonization. Marlow's mission in the story is to transport ivory and to take Kurtz, an experienced
...5) Typhoon
10) A Set of Six
The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale is an example of Conrad's later political writing, which moved away from his earlier, seafaring tales. The spy Mr. Verloc moves through London where he encounters anarchism, terrorism and revolutionary groups. Conrad also deals with the notion of exploitation.
The novel's treatment of terrorism caused it to be one of the three most cited works of literature in the American media post Spetember 11, 2001.
One of the unifying themes that runs through Joseph Conrad's work is the problem of perception: two people can witness the same event and come away with completely diverging impressions of what occurred. Given his preoccupation with perception, it comes as no surprise that Some Reminiscences, the closest thing to a memoir that Conrad ever published, is a loosely interconnected series of observations, essays, and vignettes, rather than a
...Want a glimpse into the mind of one of the most interesting and innovative writers of the twentieth century? In Notes on My Books, famed novelist Joseph Conrad discusses his creative process and lets loose some juicy details about the circumstances and inspirations that gave rise to timeless classics such as Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.