The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad

In this authoritative, insightful biography, we see the modernist master Joseph Conrad as a man who consistently reinvented himself. Born in 1857 in the Ukraine, he left home early and worked as a sailor, traveling to the Far East and Africa, and eventually settled in England, beginning a precarious existence as a novelist. John Stape describes a man with a deep sense of otherness, a writer who wrote in his third language and whose fiction became the cornerstone of modernism. With his exceptional understanding of Conrad, Stape succeeds in casting a new light on the life of a man who remains one of the greatest writers of his, and our, time.

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.


From the Hardcover edition.