Fiction; Africa - Colonialism 

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

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

Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this century’s most enduring works of fiction. Written several years after Joseph Conrad’s grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo, the novel 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.”

For the Collector's Library edition:  

With an Afterword by David Pinching

Heart of Darkness is a short and vividly brutal account of colonial enterprise that has as much in common with the jaded Evelyn Waugh of Black Mischief as it does with any of Conrad's direct contemporaries in late 19th and early 20th century. It has managed to retain the fascination of readers and scholars to a far greater extent than his other fine works, such as the more conventionally novelistic tale of South American political chicanery and greed in Nostromo and the substantially more page-turning thriller The Secret Agent. It is accompanied in this volume by the tales with which it has been published since 1902: the autobiographical short story Youth, and the less personal but more substantial tale of an old man's fall from fortune, The End of the Tether. Though these stories differ considerably in style and content from his later novels, much of his reputation rests upon the words contained in this volume.