Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

Sep 2007 · Coyote Canyon Press

About this ebook

For many years Heart of Darkness has been considered a great novella, one of a few great short novels in the Western canon. Because it addresses directly the ambiguity of good and evil, when it was first published the novel foreshadowed many of the themes and stylistic devices that define modern literature. One of Conrad's finest stories, loosely based on the author's experience of rescuing a company agent from a remote station in the heart of the Congo, Heart of Darkness is set in an atmosphere of mystery and lurking danger, and tells of Marlow's perilous journey up the Congo River to relieve his employer's agent, the fabled and terrifying Mr. Kurtz. What Marlow sees on his journey horrifies and perplexes him, and what his encounter with Kurtz reveals calls into question all of his assumptions about civilization and human nature. Endlessly reinterpreted by critics and read in schools by countless students, the novel has been adapted numerous times for film-most famously Apocalypse Now-and shows Conrad at his finest, most intense, and most sophisticated. Heart of Darkness was originally published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1899 and published in book form in 1902. The present text derives from Doubleday's collected edition of Conrad's works, published in 1920-1921.

About the author

Joseph Conrad is recognized as one of the 20th century's greatest English language novelists. He was born Jozef Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in the Polish Ukraine. His father, a writer and translator, was from Polish nobility, but political activity against Russian oppression led to his exile. Conrad was orphaned at a young age and subsequently raised by his uncle. At 17 he went to sea, an experience that shaped the bleak view of human nature which he expressed in his fiction. In such works as Lord Jim (1900), Youth (1902), and Nostromo (1904), Conrad depicts individuals thrust by circumstances beyond their control into moral and emotional dilemmas. His novel Heart of Darkness (1902), perhaps his best known and most influential work, narrates a literal journey to the center of the African jungle. This novel inspired the acclaimed motion picture Apocalypse Now. After the publication of his first novel, Almayer's Folly (1895), Conrad gave up the sea. He produced thirteen novels, two volumes of memoirs, and twenty-eight short stories. He died on August 3, 1924, in England.