Joseph Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language; though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature.
93 Facts About Joseph Conrad
2.
Joseph Conrad wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable and amoral world.
3.
Postcolonial analysis of Joseph Conrad's work has stimulated substantial debate; in 1975, author Chinua Achebe published an article denouncing Heart of Darkness as racist and dehumanising, whereas other scholars, including Adam Hochschild and Peter Edgerly Firchow, have rebutted Achebe's view.
4.
Joseph Conrad was born on 3 December 1857 in Berdychiv, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire; the region had once been part of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland.
5.
Joseph Conrad was christened Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski after his maternal grandfather Jozef, his paternal grandfather Teodor, and the heroes of two poems by Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady and Konrad Wallenrod.
6.
Joseph Conrad was arrested and imprisoned in Pavilion X of the Warsaw Citadel.
7.
The young Joseph Conrad was placed in the care of Ewa's brother, Tadeusz Bobrowski.
8.
Joseph Conrad was not a good student; despite tutoring, he excelled only in geography.
9.
Joseph Conrad recalled having read books by the American James Fenimore Cooper and the English Captain Frederick Marryat.
10.
Joseph Conrad had been at the establishment for just over a year when in September 1874, for uncertain reasons, his uncle removed him from school in Lwow and took him back to Krakow.
11.
On 13 October 1874 Bobrowski sent the sixteen-year-old to Marseilles, France, for Joseph Conrad's planned merchant-marine career on French merchant ships.
12.
Joseph Conrad's uncle provided him with a monthly stipend as well.
13.
Joseph Conrad was well read, particularly in Polish Romantic literature.
14.
Joseph Conrad belonged to the second generation in his family that had had to earn a living outside the family estates.
15.
Joseph Conrad 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.
16.
Some critics have suggested that when Joseph Conrad left Poland, he wanted to break once and for all with his Polish past.
17.
In Marseilles Joseph Conrad had an intense social life, often stretching his budget.
18.
Joseph Conrad visited Corsica with his wife in 1921, partly in search of connections with his long-dead friend and fellow merchant seaman.
19.
Joseph Conrad survived, and received further financial aid from his uncle, allowing him to resume his normal life.
20.
Joseph Conrad worked on a variety of ships as crew member and then as third, second and first mate, until eventually achieving captain's rank.
21.
Joseph Conrad's English is generally correct but stiff to the point of artificiality; many fragments suggest that his thoughts ran along the lines of Polish syntax and phraseology.
22.
Joseph Conrad had abandoned "hope for the future" and the conceit of "sailing [ever] toward Poland", and his Panslavic ideas.
23.
Joseph Conrad was left with a painful sense of the hopelessness of the Polish question and an acceptance of England as a possible refuge.
24.
Joseph Conrad's visit took place while he was waiting to proceed to the Congo Free State, having been hired by Albert Thys, deputy director of the Societe Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo.
25.
Joseph Conrad left Africa at the end of December 1890, arriving in Brussels by late January next year.
26.
Later that year, Joseph Conrad would visit his relatives in Poland and Ukraine .
27.
In 1894, aged 36, Joseph Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health, partly due to unavailability of ships, and partly because he had become so fascinated with writing that he had decided on a literary career.
28.
The Malay states came theoretically under the suzerainty of the Dutch government; Joseph Conrad did not write about the area's British dependencies, which he never visited.
29.
Joseph Conrad wrote for The Outlook, an imperialist weekly magazine, between 1898 and 1906.
30.
Joseph Conrad scorned sentimentality; his manner of portraying emotion in his books was full of restraint, scepticism and irony.
31.
Joseph Conrad suffered throughout life from ill health, physical and mental.
32.
Joseph Conrad complained of swollen hands "which made writing difficult".
33.
Joseph Conrad had a phobia of dentistry, neglecting his teeth until they had to be extracted.
34.
In March 1878, at the end of his Marseilles period, 20-year-old Joseph Conrad attempted suicide, by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver.
35.
In 1888 during a stop-over on Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, Joseph Conrad developed a couple of romantic interests.
36.
Joseph Conrad was already engaged to marry her pharmacist cousin.
37.
On 24 March 1896 Joseph Conrad married an Englishwoman, Jessie George.
38.
Joseph Conrad, who suffered frequent depressions, made great efforts to change his mood; the most important step was to move into another house.
39.
Between 1910 and 1919 Joseph Conrad's home was Capel House in Orlestone, Kent, which was rented to him by Lord and Lady Oliver.
40.
Except for several vacations in France and Italy, a 1914 vacation in his native Poland, and a 1923 visit to the United States, Joseph Conrad lived the rest of his life in England.
41.
Joseph Conrad aroused interest among the Poles as a famous writer and an exotic compatriot from abroad.
42.
Joseph Conrad, who was noted by his Polish acquaintances to still be fluent in his native tongue, participated in their impassioned political discussions.
43.
The most extensive and ambitious political statement that Joseph Conrad ever made was his 1905 essay, "Autocracy and War", whose starting point was the Russo-Japanese War.
44.
Joseph Conrad regarded the formation of a representative government in Russia as unfeasible and foresaw a transition from autocracy to dictatorship.
45.
Joseph Conrad saw western Europe as torn by antagonisms engendered by economic rivalry and commercial selfishness.
46.
Joseph Conrad thought that, in view of the weakness of human nature and of the "criminal" character of society, democracy offered boundless opportunities for demagogues and charlatans.
47.
Joseph Conrad kept his distance from partisan politics, and never voted in British national elections.
48.
Joseph Conrad resented some socialists' talk of freedom and world brotherhood while keeping silent about his own partitioned and oppressed Poland.
49.
Joseph Conrad exposes what he considered to be the naivete of movements like anarchism and socialism, and the self-serving logic of such historical but "naturalized" phenomena as capitalism, rationalism, and imperialism.
50.
On 3 August 1924, Joseph Conrad died at his house, Oswalds, in Bishopsbourne, Kent, England, probably of a heart attack.
51.
Joseph Conrad was interred at Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, under a misspelled version of his original Polish name, as "Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski".
52.
Joseph Conrad used his sailing experiences as a backdrop for many of his works, but he produced works of similar world view, without the nautical motifs.
53.
Nevertheless, Joseph Conrad found much sympathetic readership, especially in the United States.
54.
Mencken was one of the earliest and most influential American readers to recognise how Joseph Conrad conjured up "the general out of the particular".
55.
Since Fitzgerald, dozens of other American writers have acknowledged their debts to Joseph Conrad, including William Faulkner, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Thomas Pynchon.
56.
Joseph Conrad used his own memories as literary material so often that readers are tempted to treat his life and work as a single whole.
57.
Joseph Conrad used his own experiences as raw material, but the finished product should not be confused with the experiences themselves.
58.
The historic trader Olmeijer, whom Joseph Conrad encountered on his four short visits to Berau in Borneo, subsequently haunted Joseph Conrad's imagination.
59.
Joseph Conrad plotted a revolution in the Costaguanan fictional port of Sulaco that mirrored the real-life secessionist movement brewing in Panama.
60.
Joseph Conrad was keenly conscious of tragedy in the world and in his works.
61.
Unlike many authors who make it a point not to discuss work in progress, Joseph Conrad often did discuss his current work and even showed it to select friends and fellow authors, such as Edward Garnett, and sometimes modified it in the light of their critiques and suggestions.
62.
Joseph Conrad believed that his [own] life was like a series of short episodes.
63.
Joseph Conrad borrowed from other, Polish- and French-language authors, to an extent sometimes skirting plagiarism.
64.
Joseph Conrad seems to have used eminent writers' texts as raw material of the same kind as the content of his own memory.
65.
Joseph Conrad did not imitate, but 'continued' his masters.
66.
Joseph Conrad was right in saying: 'I don't resemble anybody.
67.
Joseph Conrad's heroes were often alone, and close to hostility and danger.
68.
Sometimes, when Joseph Conrad's imagination was at its most fertile and his command of English at its most precise, the danger came darkly from within the self.
69.
Joseph Conrad sought then to evoke rather than delineate, using something close to the language of prayer.
70.
Joseph Conrad worked as though between the intricate systems of a ship and the vague horizon of a vast sea.
71.
Joseph Conrad spoke his native Polish and the French language fluently from childhood and only acquired English in his twenties.
72.
Joseph Conrad says in his preface to A Personal Record that writing in English was for him "natural", and that the idea of his having made a deliberate choice between English and French, as some had suggested, was in error.
73.
Certainly his Uncle Tadeusz thought Joseph Conrad might write in Polish; in an 1881 letter he advised his 23-year-old nephew:.
74.
Joseph Conrad was well versed in French history and literature, and French novelists were his artistic models.
75.
Joseph Conrad was thus an English writer who grew up in other linguistic and cultural environments.
76.
Joseph Conrad, who had had little contact with everyday spoken Polish, simplified the dialogue, left out Herup's scientific expressions, and missed many amusing nuances.
77.
Joseph Conrad left out many accents of topical satire in the presentation of the dramatis personae and ignored not only the ungrammatical speech of some characters but even the Jewishness of two of them, Bolo and Mosan.
78.
Joseph Conrad always retained a strong emotional attachment to his native language.
79.
Joseph Conrad bridled at being referred to as a Russian or "Slavonic" writer.
80.
Joseph Conrad made English literature more mature and reflective because he called attention to the sheer horror of political realities overlooked by English citizens and politicians.
81.
Joseph Conrad's poet father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a Polish nationalist and an opponent of serfdom.
82.
Yet, in spite of having become a subject of Queen Victoria, Joseph Conrad had not ceased to be a subject of Tsar Alexander III.
83.
Notwithstanding the undoubted sufferings that Joseph Conrad endured on many of his voyages, sentimentality and canny marketing place him at the best lodgings in several of his destinations.
84.
Joseph Conrad's visit to Bangkok remains in that city's collective memory, and is recorded in the official history of The Oriental Hotel along with that of a less well-behaved guest, Somerset Maugham, who pilloried the hotel in a short story in revenge for attempts to eject him.
85.
In 1919 and 1922 Joseph Conrad's growing renown and prestige among writers and critics in continental Europe fostered his hopes for a Nobel Prize in Literature.
86.
Joseph Conrad's manner was perfect, almost too elaborate; so nervous and sympathetic that every fibre of him seemed electric.
87.
Joseph Conrad talked English with a strong accent, as if he tasted his words in his mouth before pronouncing them; but he talked extremely well, though he had always the talk and manner of a foreigner.
88.
Joseph Conrad was dressed very carefully in a blue double-breasted jacket.
89.
Joseph Conrad spoke of the horrors of the Congo, from the moral and physical shock of which he said he had never recovered.
90.
Joseph Conrad made me feel so natural and very much myself, that I was almost afraid of losing the thrill and wonder of being there, although I was vibrating with intense excitement inside.
91.
Joseph Conrad spoke English with a very strong foreign accent, and nothing in his demeanour in any way suggested the sea.
92.
Joseph Conrad was an aristocratic Polish gentleman to his fingertips.
93.
Joseph Conrad looked with less optimism than Russell on the possibilities of scientific and philosophic knowledge.