Joseph Conrad

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guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 July 2008 15.39 BST

1857-1924

"Words, as is well known, are great foes of reality."

Birthplace

Berdyczow, Poland

Education

Due to the arrest of his father, a Polish patriot, Conrad spent the early part of his life in exile in Russia. He began his schooling at 12, in Poland and then in Switzerland.

Other jobs

Conrad became a sailor on French merchant vessels when he was 27 and did not retire from seafaring for another 20 years. In 1886, at the same time as he became a British subject, he qualified as a master mariner.

Did you know?

When Conrad first arrived in England, landing at Lowestoft on a British freighter in 1878, he spoke only six words of English.

Critical verdict

Conrad combines adventure tale with psychological insight; his compressed prose - "The horror! The horror!" - stays with the reader.

Recommended works

Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Victory, The Secret Agent

Influences

As a child Conrad read Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens and Thackeray in Polish and French.

Now read on

For writing similarly influenced by a life on the sea, turn to Ernest Hemingway, particularly One Man and the Sea and To Have and Have Not. Try also The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, who collaborated with Conrad on three different works - The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of A Crime (1909). Conrad's terrorist tale, The Secret Agent, was rumoured to have inspired the Unabomber.

Adaptations

Francis Ford Coppola turned Heart of Darkness into the classic movie Apocalypse Now (1979), starring Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando. More recently, a fantastic cast (including Gerard Depardieu, Bob Hoskins, Robin Willams and Jim Broadbent) failed to stop The Secret Agent (1996) bombing at the box office.