The Sea Dreamer: A Definitive Biography of Joseph Conrad

Of Joseph Conrad, H.L. Mencken has written: ‘There was something almost suggesting the vastness of a natural phenomenon. He transcended all the rules. There have been perhaps, greater novelists, but I believe that he was incomparably the greatest artist whoever wrote a novel.’

Originally published in 1957, the year of the centenary of Conrad’s birth, and although he was firmly established among the world’s great literary figures, little was known about him generally, beyond the fact that he ...