Today (03/08/2024) is the 100th anniversary of the death of Joseph Conrad. He was a Polish-British novelist who became one of the greatest writers to utilise the English language, despite not being fluent in it until he was in his twenties. He brought a non-English sensibility to English literature. His mastery of prose style is evident in his renowned works, Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907).
Conrad endured an erratic upbringing owing to the political activism that his father, Apollo Nalęcz Korzeniowski, engaged in. This led the family to move on multiple occasions. Apollo was one of the organisers of the committee that went on to direct the Polish insurrection against Russian rule in 1863. Before this, he was arrested in 1861, and was subsequently exiled to Vologda in northern Russia. His family went with him. The harsh climate hastened his wife’s death from tuberculosis in 1865.
Conrad was exposed to the English language when his father began translating the works of Shakespeare to make ends meet. Four years after his wife, in 1869, Apollo suffered the same fate and died of tuberculosis. Conrad was placed under the care of his maternal uncle, who sent him to be schooled in Kraków and then Switzerland. Conrad had always wanted to be at sea, so in 1874 he left for Marseilles to join the French merchant navy.
Inspired by his experiences at sea, many of Conrad’s stories have nautical settings. He began his seafaring career as an apprentice, and then as a steward on several commercial French ships, before he joined the British merchant marines, where he was employed for 16 years. Ill health ultimately forced him to settle in Britain, where he married the daughter of a bookseller and entered literary circles. Here, he befriended prominent writers such as Ford Madox Ford and H. G. Wells.
Conrad began his own literary career with the novel Almayer's Folly (1895). This explored several themes that would become characteristic of his writing: adventure, isolation, and colonialism. He often used his own memories as literary material, leading some readers to treat his stories as semi-autobiographical. He was also interested in drawing parallels between the inner lives and torments of the individual, and the broader sweep of human history.
Several of Conrad’s major works first appeared in serialised form in magazines, such as The Illustrated London News, before they were published as novels. His work influenced numerous twentieth century writers, as he pioneered many of the narrative innovations and techniques that characterised the Modernist period. He continued to write and publish novels well into his later life—his final novel, The Rover (1923), was published just a year before his death.
On 3 August 1924, Conrad died at his home in Kent from a heart attack. He was laid to rest at Canterbury Cemetery, where his original Polish name, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, was misspelled on his headstone.