Heart of Darkness
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Joseph Conrad
Title Page
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Youth
Copyright
About the Book
The silence of the jungle is broken only by the ominous sound of drumming. Life on the river is brutal and unknown threats lurk in the darkness. Marlow’s mission to captain a steamer upriver into the dense interior leads him into conflict with the others who haunt the forest. But his decision to hunt down the mysterious Mr Kurtz, an ivory trader who is the subject of sinister rumours, leads him into more than just physical peril.
About the Author
Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born in the Ukraine on 3 December 1857. His parents were Polish and had both died in exile by the time Conrad was eleven years old. His uncle became his guardian and looked after him in Krakow until he was sixteen when he went to sea. He worked on both French and British ships before he became a British citizen in 1886 and changed his name to Joseph Conrad. In 1896 he married Jessie George and they later had two sons. His first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was published in 1895 and he went on to write many more, as well as short stories, essays and a memoir. His most famous work, Heart of Darkness, was inspired by his experiences working on a steamboat in the Congo. After its publication in 1899 in Blackwood’s Magazine, Heart of Darkness was first published in book form in 1902 with the story Youth, which also features the character of Marlow. Joseph Conrad died on 3 August 1924.
Also by Joseph Conrad
Almayer’s Folly
An Outcast of the Islands
The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’
Lord Jim
Typhoon
Nostromo
The Secret Agent
The Mirror of the Sea
Under Western Eyes
Chance
Victory
The Shadow-Line
The Rescue
The Rover
INTRODUCTION
Seldom can an author have achieved his aim for a novel more completely than Joseph Conrad with Heart of Darkness. In an author’s note written in 1917, Conrad described his hope to instil enough power in the sombre theme of the book that it would ‘hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck’. Few could dispute that this is what he did. It was first published in 1899 as a three-part serial in the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine and in complete form three years later, alongside Youth in one volume, Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories, but, more than a hundred years on, Heart of Darkness still resonates. Modern film-makers and writers allude to it routinely and some of the book’s contents, like ‘the Inner Station’, ‘Mr Kurtz’, ‘The horror! The horror!’, have become key parts of literary iconography.