The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad

These selected letters taken from the Cambridge edition illuminate Conrad's significance as the Polish-speaking child of political exiles, a deckhand who worked his way up to captain, and one of the major writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Since the publication of the Cambridge edition of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, the numerous letters in the nine volumes, many of them published for the first time and many more taken from hard-to-find books and journals, have had a profound influence on writing about Conrad. This selection makes the highlights available in one volume. The letters have been re-edited with shorter footnotes and an emphasis on the latest scholarship. Letters originally written in French or Polish appear only in revised English translations. Among the topics that stand out are Conrad's memories of growing up in Poland and Ukraine, his ideas about fiction, often expressed in precise but sympathetic comments on the work of his friends, the anxieties of war and revolution, his struggle to keep his integrity as a writer, and his lives as a sailor and a family man.