Heart of Darkness

Resumen del libro

With an Introduction by Caryl Phillips
Commentary by H.L. Mencken, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Lionel Trilling, Chiua Achebe, and Philip Gourevitch

"Heart of Darkness," which appeared at the very beginning of our century, was a Cassandra cry announcing the end of Victorian Europe, on the verge of transforming itself into the Europe of violence," wrote the critic Czeslaw Milosz.

Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this century's most enduring--and harrowing--works of fiction. Written several years after Conrad's grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo, the novel tells the story of Marlow, a seaman who undertakes his own journey into the African jungle to find the tormented white trader Kurtz. Rich in irony and spellbinding prose, Heart of Darkness is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin line between civilization and barbarity. This edition contains selections from Conrad's Congo Diary of 1890--the first notes, in effect, for the novel which was composed at the end of that decade.
Virginia Woolf wrote of Conrad, "His books are full of moments of vision. They light up a whole character in a flash. . . . He could not write badly, one feels, to save his life."

Biografía del autor

Nacido como Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (Berdyczów, entonces Imperio ruso, actual Ucrania, 1857-Bishopsbourne, Inglaterra, 1924), fue un novelista polaco que adoptó el inglés como lengua literaria. Su obra explora la vulnerabilidad y la inestabilidad moral del ser humano cuando es sometido a una situación límite. Considerado como uno de los más grandes novelistas de la literatura inglesa, entre sus títulos destacan 'El corazón de las tienieblas' (1899), 'Lord Jim' (1900), 'El agente secreto' (1907) y 'Bajo la mirada de Occidente' (1911).