Heart of Darkness
Marlow sits on a boat on the Thames and tells a story about going up a river in Africa to find a man who has stopped sending reports. The frame is important: everything we hear is spoken aloud to people who are already sceptical, and Marlow keeps interrupting himself.
Conrad had sailed the Congo himself and had seen what the ivory trade did there. The novella is now argued over for the way it uses Africa as a backdrop for a European crisis of conscience. That argument is part of reading it; the prose is dense, deliberate and unusually good at describing delay.
Public-domain status
First published in 1899. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Joseph Conrad died in 1924, so this work has been free to republish there since 1995.
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