Joseph Conrad: The Masterworks (Vol. II): Contains "Lord Jim", "Nostromo", and "An Outpost of Progress"

Joseph Conrad: The Masterworks #2

by Joseph Conrad

Few men have deserved their reputation more than Joseph Conrad. From a life of adventure as a young man on the high seas to a dignified position at the heart of the English literary community, Conrad has seen and told it all.

The Masterworks (Vol. II) picks up where Volume I left off in its introduction of Joseph Conrad to a new generation of readers. Inside is An Outpost of Progress, a short story which Conrad considered perhaps his greatest (or at least most disciplined) story, along with the novels Lord Jim and Nostromo. Lord Jim tells the story of a disgraced sailor's odyssey in search of peace and redemption deep in the jungles of the South Pacific. Nostromo is a tale of revolution set in the rogues gallery of a South American dictatorship. While Heart of Darkness is Conrad’s best-known work, it is these novels that cemented Conrad’s status as the preeminent author of the English-speaking world, offering an unflinching look at the Age of Colonialism and the eternal men who travelled along its edges.

638 pages, Paperback

Published December 14, 2022

About the author

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and, although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he became a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable, and amoral world.
Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.