We all have heard the stories about great works being rejected by publishers. Many of these stories are humorous because they are in the past, and the recipient or the target of those rejections have become celebrated. We laugh – or if we are unkind, we snicker – at the […]
Once, while at a slavery museum in my region, I saw a picture of a horribly abused man, a runaway slave, who’d been whipped so brutally that the skin on his back was pigmented into one massive grayish whelp. The image stuck with me, haunted me, but what reverberates in […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.