From Our Editors
The meeting between Marlow and Kurtz is one of the greatest
literary confrontations to date. The powerful metaphor of Marlow's
journey down a Congo River as a discovery of humanity's dark
impulses gives Joseph Conrad's Heart
of Darkness and The Congo Diary entry into the
Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. This
edition pairs the masterful piece of fiction with a personal diary
of the author's trip up the Congo River in 1890.
Conrad worked as a merchant marine on many ships
before writing these important works.
From the Publisher
With an Introduction by Caryl Phillips
Commentary by H.L. Mencken, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ernest
Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Lionel Trilling, Chiua Achebe, and
Philip Gourevitch
"Heart of Darkness," which appeared at the very beginning of our
century, was a Cassandra cry announcing the end of Victorian
Europe, on the verge of transforming itself into the Europe of
violence," wrote the critic Czeslaw Milosz.
Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of
this century''s most enduring--and harrowing--works of fiction.
Written several years after Conrad''s grueling sojourn in the
Belgian Congo, the novel tells the story of Marlow, a seaman who
undertakes his own journey into the African jungle to find the
tormented white trader Kurtz. Rich in irony and spellbinding prose,
Heart of Darkness is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil, and
the thin line between civilization and barbarity. This edition
contains selections from Conrad''s Congo Diary of 1890--the first
notes, in effect, for the novel which was composed at the end of
that decade.
Virginia Woolf wrote of Conrad, "His books are full of moments of
vision. They light up a whole character in a flash. . . . He could
not write badly, one feels, to save his life.
From the Jacket
With an Introduction by Caryl Phillips
Commentary by H.L. Mencken, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ernest
Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Lionel Trilling, Chiua Achebe, and
Philip Gourevitch
"Heart of Darkness," which appeared at the very beginning of our
century, was a Cassandra cry announcing the end of Victorian
Europe, on the verge of transforming itself into the Europe of
violence," wrote the critic Czeslaw Milosz.
Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this
century''s most enduring--and harrowing--works of fiction. Written
several years after Conrad''s grueling sojourn in the Belgian
Congo, the novel tells the story of Marlow, a seaman who undertakes
his own journey into the African jungle to find the tormented white
trader Kurtz. Rich in irony and spellbinding prose, Heart of
Darkness is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin
line between civilization and barbarity. This edition contains
selections from Conrad''s Congo Diary of 1890--the first notes, in
effect, for the novel which was composed at the end of that
decade.
Virginia Woolf wrote of Conrad, "His books are full of moments of
vision. They light up a whole character in a flash. . . . He could
not write badly, one feels, to save his life."
About the Author
Jospeh Conrad (1957-1924) grew up amid political
unrest in Russian-occupied Poland. After twenty years at sea with
the French and British merchant navies, he settled in England in
1894. Over the next three decades he revolutionized the English
novel with works such as Typhoon (1902), Youth (1902), Nostromo
(1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Chance
(1913), and Victory (1915).
Caryl Phillips is the author of many works of fiction and
nonfiction. His novel A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth
Writers' Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His
other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a
Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Phillips is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives
in New York City.
Trade Paperback
176 Pages, 5.18 x 7.99 x 0.38 in
August 19, 1999
Random House Publishing Group
English
037575377X
9780375753770