Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents in the Russian Empire, was orphaned young after his father's political exile. He went to sea at sixteen, served in French and British merchant ships for twenty years and became a British master mariner. In 1890 he commanded a river steamer in the Congo Free State, an experience that broke his health and shaped Heart of Darkness. Writing in English, his third language, he produced Lord Jim, Nostromo and The Secret Agent.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
Lord Jim begins with an omniscient narrator describing Jim, a young English parson's son who went to sea after reading light holiday literature and dreams of heroic deeds. Injured by a falling spar, he recovers in an Eastern port and takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna, a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Arabian Sea.
