Conrad, Joseph

Joseph Conrad (Jozef Korzeniowski, 1857 to 1924) was a Polish-born British author who served sixteen years in the French and British merchant marine, qualifying as a master mariner in 1886 before writing in English, his third language. His sea fiction includes Lord Jim (1900), Typhoon (1902), The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), and the novella Heart of Darkness (1899). Drawing on real commands such as the barque Otago, he wrote the moral isolation of officers under pressure rather than adventure, making him the central figure of serious maritime literature.