Lord Jim - (Everyman's Library Classics) by Joseph Conrad (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Lord Jim is a classic story of one man's tragic failure and eventual redemption, told under the circumstances of high adventure at the margins of the known world which made Conrad's work so immediately popular. But it is also the book in which its author, through a brilliant adaptation of his stylistic apparatus to his obsessive moral, psychological and political concerns, laid the groundwork for the modern novel as we know it.

With An Introduction By Norman Sherry

An expert on the works of Joseph Conrad, Professor Norman Sherry is the author of Conrad's Eastern World, Conrad's Western World and Conrad and His World. He is also the editor of Conrad: The Critical Heritage, and the official biographer of Graham Greene.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

From the Back Cover

Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman--'as unflinching as a hero in a book'--who is disgraced by an act of cowardice while serving as an officer on the Patna, a merchant-ship sailing from 'an Eastern port' with a party of Muslim pilgrims. His life is blighted: an isolated scandal assumes horrifying proportions. An older man, Marlow, befriends Jim, but his efforts to find him employment meet with little success until, at last, he is able to establish him in Patusan, a remote native settlement on one of the islands of the Malay Archipelago.

About the Author

Joseph Conrad, christened Josef Teodor Konrad, Nalecz Korzeniowski, was born on December 3, 1857, in a part of Russia that had once belonged to Poland. His parents were members of the landed gentry, but as ardent Polish patriots, the suffered considerably for their political views. Orphaned at eleven, Conrad attended school for a few years in Cracow, He soon concluded, however, that there was no future for a Pole in occupied Poland, and at sixteen he left his ancestral home forever.

The sea was Conrad's love and career for the next twenty years. In the French merchant marine, he sailed to the West. Indies, smuggled guns to Spanish rebels, ran into debt, and bungled a suicide attempt Then in the British merchant navy, he rose to first mate and finally to captain, sailing to Australia and Borneo and surviving at least one shipwreck. In 1890 he contracted to become captain of a Congo River steamer, but the six months he spent in Africa led only to disillusionment and ill health; this episode would become the basis for Conrad's masterpiece, Heart of Darkness. Reluctantly leaving the merchant service, he settled in England and completed his first novel, Almayer's Folly, already begun at sea.

Hi subsequent works, many of which drew upon his sea experiences, include The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897), Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1902), Youth (1902) Typhoon (1903), Nastromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), The Secret Sharer (1910), Under the Western Eyes (1911), and Chance (1913). The man who was twenty-one years old before he spoke a word of English is now regarded as one of the superb English stylists of all time. Conrad died almost literally on his desk in 1924, at the age of sixty-six.