Biographie de Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in the Russian part of Poland in 1837. His parents were punished by the Russians for their Polish nationalist activities and both died while Conrad was still a child. In 1874 he left Poland for France and in 1878 began a career with the British merchant navy. He spent nearly twenty years as a sailor before becoming a full-time novelist. He became a British subject in 1886 and settled permanently in England after his marriage to Jessie George in 1896.
Conrad is a writer of extreme subtlety and sophistication; works such as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Nostromo display technical complexities which have established him as one of the first English Modernists.
He is also noted for the unprecedented vividness with which he communicates a pessimist's view of man's personal and social destiny in such works as The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and Victory. Despite the immediate critical recognition that they received in his lifetime, Conrad's major novels did not sell, and he lived in relative poverty until the commercial success of Chance (1914) secured for him a wider public and an assured income.
In 1923 he visited the United States, to great acclaim, and he was offered a knighthood (which he declined) shortly before his death in 1924. Since then his reputation has steadily grown, and he is now seen as a writer who revolutionized the English novel and was arguably the most important literary innovator of the twentieth century. Cedric Watts is Professor of English at the University of Sussex.
His books on Conrad include Conrad's Heart of Darkness : A Critical and Contextual Discussion (1977), A Preface to Conrad (1982, 2nd edn. 1993), The Decepive Text (1984), Joseph Conrad: A Literary Life (1989), and Joseph Conrad (1994). His other works include A Preface to Greene and (with John Sutherland) Henry V, War Criminal? and Other Shakespeare Puzzles, He has edited numerous texts by Shakespeare, Hardy Cunninghame Graham, and Conrad.
Mara Kalnins is the General Editor of the Works of Joseph Conrad in the Oxford World's Classics series. She is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Staff Tutor in Literature, Board of Continuing Education.
