Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad did not begin to learn English
until he was twenty-one years old. He was born Jozef Teodor
Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in the Polish Ukraine.
When Conrad was quite young, his father was exiled to Siberia on
suspicion of plotting against the Russian government. After the
death of the boy’s mother, Conrad’s father sent him to his
mother’s brother in Kraków to be educated, and Conrad never
again saw his father. He traveled to Marseilles when he was
seventeen and spent the next twenty years as a sailor. He signed
on to an English ship in 1878, and eight years later he became a
British subject. In 1889, he began his first novel, Almayer’s
Folly, and began actively searching for a way to fulfill his
boyhood dream of traveling to the Congo. He took command of a
steamship in the Belgian Congo in 1890, and his experiences in
the Congo came to provide the outline for Heart of Darkness.
Conrad’s time in Africa wreaked havoc on his health, however,
and he returned to England t