Or, Proof it’s Never Too Late to Learn

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Joseph Conrad was born in Berdychiv, in Russian-controlled Ukraine, in an area that had once been Poland, as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. When he was eleven, both his parents died from tuberculosis. As a teenager, he traveled to Marseille, where he began his nautical career, working on first French ships, then British ones. Though he spoke Polish and French from childhood, and was exposed to many English literary classics as a child, he did not begin learning to speak English until he was 21. Which did not, as it turned out, prevent him from becoming one of the most celebrated English writers of his generation.

Conrad would serve 16 years with the British merchant navy, and he would become an expert in the English language, though he would always speak it with an accent. Around 1883, on a voyage to Bombay, he began writing letters in his adopted tongue. On July 2 1886, he applied for British citizenship, and on August 19, 1866, he became a citizen.

In 1895, when he was 37, recently retired from life at sea, he published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, using his anglicized name, Joseph Conrad. He published with great frequency after that—his enduring works including Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911)—until his death in 1924.