Joseph Conrad

This landmark critical study, published when Conrad was still living and at the height of his powers, represents one of the earliest sustained assessments of a writer who had revolutionized English literature despite never having spoken English until his twenties. Hugh Walpole, himself a rising star of early twentieth-century fiction, traces Conrad's extraordinary trajectory from Polish exile to master mariner to one of the language's most distinctive prose stylists. The book examines how a man who grew up in the shadow of imperial Poland, who learned to command ships in the French and British merchant services, and who chose to write his fiction in his third language, developed a voice unlike any other in modern literature. Walpole explores the tension between Conrad's romantic sensibility and his increasingly dark moral vision, between the sea's majestic indifference and the psychological depths he plumbed in works like Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. This is both a portrait of an artist and an argument for his significance, written by someone who knew him personally and understood the peculiar alchemy of his achievement.