Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, came of a Polish noble family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, a poet and Polish patriot, was exiled by the Tsar; his mother died in exile, and when he was eleven he lost his father too and was raised by an uncle. At sixteen he went to Marseilles to be a sailor, later joined the British merchant navy, and spent twenty years at sea, sailing to Southeast Asia, Australia, South America and Africa and rising to captain. In 1890 he commanded a river steamer in the Belgian Congo and saw with his own eyes the brutality of colonial rule, the experience behind Heart of Darkness. In his thirties he settled in England and wrote in English, his third language, which he had learned only after twenty, becoming one of the greatest novelists in English literature.