The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad is the first new biography in more than a decade of one of modern literature’s most important writers--whose work remains widely read and acutely relevant eighty years after his death. In this authoritative, insightful book, we see Joseph Conrad as a man who consistently reinvented himself. Born in 1857 in Berdichev, Ukraine, he left home early and worked as a sailor out of Marseilles; traveled to the Far East and Africa with the British merchant navy; and, finally, in 1891, settled in England, beginning a precarious existence as an novelist and family man. Here is a Conrad for our moment: a man with a deep sense of otherness; a writer with multiple cultural identities who wrote in his third language and whose fiction became the cornerstone of literary Modernism.

With his exceptional knowledge and understanding of Conrad, and drawing on unpublished letters and documents, John Stape succeeds in casting an illuminating new light on the life of a willfully enigmatic man who remains one of the greatest writers of his, and our, time.

An authoritative new biography of literary master Joseph Conrad draws on previously unpublished letters and other source material to shed new light on the colorful life and work of one the most influential authors of his generation. 15,000 first printing.

John Stape is Research Fellow at St. Mary’s University College, London. He has taught in universities in Canada, France, and the Far East. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, and co-editor of two volumes of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. He divides his time between Vancouver and London.

'Pole-Catholic and gentleman' (1857-1878) — 'Tell me the sea': apprentice, mate, and master (1878-1890) — Crisis: finding a home (1890-1895) — Husband and writer (1896-1898) — 'The fatal partnership': collaborator and friend (1899-1904) — The analyst of illusions (1905-1909) — Breakdown and recovery (1910-1914) — The Englishman (1915-1919) — 'Smiling public man' (1920-1924).