Author(s): John Stape

Literary biography

When he died in 1924, Virginia Woolf wrote of Joseph Conrad, 'Suddenly, our guest has left us...There was always an air of mystery around him.' Never quite an Englishman, Conrad is depicted in this authoritative new biography as a man who consistently reinvented himself, transforming fiction into life and, in turn, life into litererature.Having endured a difficult childhood in the politically repressive Austro-Hungarian empire Conrad took to the seas, first working as a sailor in Marseilles, before joining the British merchant navy and travelling to the Far East and the Congo.
John Stape's compelling new biography offers a Conrad for our times, a man with a deep sense of otherness, of multiple cultural identities, writing in his third language. He is a working writer, always concerned about his royalties, and a man and writer defined by his relationships with other men.