Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 3 December 1857  – 3 August 1924) was a Polish novelist who wrote in English, after settling in England. 

Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked Polish accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. 

While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, William S. Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, William Golding, Joseph Heller, Italo Calvino, V.S. Naipaul, Hunter S. Thompson and J.M. Coetzee. 

Films have been adapted from or inspired by Conrad's Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Victory, The Shadow Line, and The Rover. 

Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while also plumbing the depths of the human soul. Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Joseph Conrad, a major novelist in the English language, did not spring full-blown, out of the British merchant navy, without a rich earlier personal history. By the time he left Poland, aged sixteen, for the wider world to become a sailor, he had absorbed enough of the history, culture and literature of his native land to be able eventually to develop a distinctive world view and make unique contributions to the literature of his adoptive Britain. It was tensions that originated in his childhood in Poland and grew in his adulthood abroad that would give rise to Conrad's greatest literary achievements. 

Conrad was born on 3 December 1857, in the Russian Empire at Berdichev (Polish: Berdyczów; now Berdychiv, Ukraine), in Podolia, a part of Ukraine that had belonged to Poland until the Second Partition of Poland, of 1793. (What had remained of Poland was expunged from the map of Europe in the Third Partition, in 1795.) The great majority of the area's inhabitants were Ukrainians, but most of the land was owned by a Polish upper class of szlachta (nobility). Both of Conrad's parents, Apollo Korzeniowski, of Nałęcz coat-of-arms, and Ewa (Polish for "Eve") née Bobrowska, belonged to that nobility, which, in the virtual absence of a higher bourgeoisie, was the sole repository of polite culture. Literature, particularly patriotic literature, was held in high esteem.