The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad (The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Joseph Conrad)

by Joseph Conrad, Laurence Davies (Editor), Gene M. Moore (Editor)

Volume Eight of Conrad's collected letters covers the last nineteen months of his life (1923-24). Much of this correspondence is unpublished; its editors have had access to the major private collections as well as holdings in public and academic libraries. The letters themselves are accompanied by notes on contexts, allusions, and editorial problems, and prefaced with a general introduction and biographies of the correspondents. Letters to his family written during his visit to the United States are a notable feature of this collection, which is also rich in comments on literary questions, current events, his experiences at sea, the reception of The Rover, and work on his unfinished novel, Suspense.

498 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and, although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he became a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He 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.
Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.