Joseph Conrad
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Polish immigrant seaman who wrote some of the English language's most powerful novels around the turn of the century. He is particularly remarkable for the fact that English was his third language. Noted novels are Nostromo, Lord Jim, and of course Heart of Darkness, the novel about Africa that is unfortunately more famous with today's world for being the inspiration for the movie 'Apocalypse Now' by Francis Ford Coppola. As good as the movie is, the novel reaches heights far beyond America's obsession with Vietnam. In particular, its meditations on the nature of language and communication, and the physical impossibility of truly conveying experience to another by any art, raise issues that are still to be dealt with today. "We live as we dream - alone."
