ABSTRACT
In 1899, when Heart of Darkness was published in Blackwood’s Magazine, Joseph Conrad was in his early forties, and had made an unusual career change. As Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski he had left his native Poland at the age of sixteen to become a seaman, first in the French then the British merchant navy. He rose to the position of master, becoming a British citizen in 1886. He began writing (in English, his third language) between voyages, and his first novel, which had taken him several years to complete, was published in 1895.
