Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, ; 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British writer—the double man." }} regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. Cf. Zdzisław Najder's similar observation: "He was [...] an English writer who grew up in other linguistic and cultural environments. His work can be seen as located in the borderland of auto-translation." }} Conrad wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of what he saw as an impassive, inscrutable universe.}}

Conrad is considered an early modernist,}} though his works contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in ''Lord Jim'', for example, have influenced numerous authors, and many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that Conrad's fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events. V. S. Naipaul writes: "Conrad's value to me is that he is someone who sixty to seventy years ago meditated on my world, a world I recognize today. I feel this about no other writer of the [20th] century." Maya Jasanoff, drawing analogies between events in Conrad's fictions and 21st-century world events, writes: "Conrad's pen was like a magic wand, conjuring the spirits of the future." Adam Hochschild makes the same point about Conrad's seeming prescience in ''his'' review of Maya Jasanoff's ''The Dawn Watch'' Hochschild also notes: "It is startling... how seldom [in the late 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, European imperialism in South America, Africa, and Asia] appear[ed] in the work of the era's European writers." Conrad was a notable exception.}}

Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew, among other things, on his native Poland's national experiences}} and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche. Provided by Wikipedia