Heart of Darkness (Reader's Library Classics)

Joseph Conrad

Reader's Library Classics, Feb 18, 2021 - Africa - 116 pages

But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.

Charles Marlow, at the behest of his employer, an ivory trading company, travels to the heart of Africa with a simple order: seek out an important trading post headed by a man named Kurtz. On his steamboat down the Congo River, Marlow begins to discover a developing lore surrounding Kurtz, who has reached a near mystical and divine status among the natives, yet feared and intimidating all the same.

A seminal novel that had a wide range of influence in the century to follow, Heart of Darkness explores the disturbing idea that the sanity residing in the human psyche is frightfully close to the edge of madness.

About the author

Joseph Conrad is recognized as one of the 20th century's greatest English language novelists. He was born Jozef Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in the Polish Ukraine. His father, a writer and translator, was from Polish nobility, but political activity against Russian oppression led to his exile. Conrad was orphaned at a young age and subsequently raised by his uncle. At 17 he went to sea, an experience that shaped the bleak view of human nature which he expressed in his fiction. In such works as Lord Jim (1900), Youth (1902), and Nostromo (1904), Conrad depicts individuals thrust by circumstances beyond their control into moral and emotional dilemmas. His novel Heart of Darkness (1902), perhaps his best known and most influential work, narrates a literal journey to the center of the African jungle. This novel inspired the acclaimed motion picture Apocalypse Now. After the publication of his first novel, Almayer's Folly (1895), Conrad gave up the sea. He produced thirteen novels, two volumes of memoirs, and twenty-eight short stories. He died on August 3, 1924, in England.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Heart of Darkness (Reader's Library Classics)
• Author: Joseph Conrad
• Publisher: Reader's Library Classics, 2021
• ISBN: 1954839138, 9781954839137
• Length: 116 pages