"Cliff Notes - Lord Jim" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Captain Korzeniowski (as Conrad was still known) didn't realize
it, but he was approaching the end of his sea career. In 1889
he had begun a novel based on his voyages to Asia. He continued
work on it in Africa and afterward, and in 1895 the book
appeared as Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad. (After putting up
for years with British garblings of "Korzeniowski" he decided to
put something they could pronounce on the title page.) Like most
of the books he wrote for the next 20 years, the novel was a
success with the critics but not the public. It was dedicated
to the memory of his uncle Bobrowski, who had died in 1894.

Writing was difficult, even painful, for Conrad. He was
agonizingly slow, though financial pressures drove him to work
faster than he liked. Consequently, he was almost always
dissatisfied with the finished product. (He called Lord Jim,
the novel that many regard as his masterpiece, "too wretched for
words" and lamented, "How bad oh! HOW BAD!") His already wobbly
finances became even shakier after his marriage, in 1896, and
the birth of two sons, in 1898 and 1906. There were periods of
remarkable productiveness (he completed Heart of Darkness in
less than two months), but these alternated with periods of
despair in which he could write nothing; in addition, he had
recurrent bouts of nervous exhaustion and gout to contend with.
Conrad once described his father in words that could have well
described himself: "A man of great sensibilities; of exalted
and dreamy temperament, with a terrible gift of irony and of
gloomy disposition."

Although his income from his books remained low, Conrad's
reputation grew steadily higher. He was a "writer's writer"
whose friends and admirers included such famous authors as Ford
Madox Ford, Stephen Crane, John Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, H.
G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and his idol, Henry James. His
well-received books included Typhoon (1902), Nostromo (1904),
and The Secret Agent (1907). After 1910 he finally became
financially secure. In that year, he was awarded a small
pension. He was able to begin selling his manuscripts to an
American collector. In 1911, Conrad published Under Western
Eyes. And he finally attained best-sellerdom with his novel
Chance, serialized in 1912 in the New York Herald and published
in book form two years later in Great Britain and America.
Victory followed in 1915. In 1923 Conrad enjoyed an
enthusiastic reception during a visit to the United States. He
was dogged by serious illness by this time, however, and died on
August 3, 1924, in England.

Conrad's work was crucial to the development of the modern
novel. In his use of the limited point of view--that is,
presenting a tale through a single consciousness (in the case of