Youth/Heart of Darkness/Typhoon

Joseph Conrad came to writing after having been a sailor for nearly twenty years.  The three long stories in this volume were composed early in his literary career, a few years after a grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo as the commander of a river steamer.  "Youth" (1898) is the first of Conrad's stories to feature Captain Marlow, later the narrator of "Heart of Darkness", Lord Jim , and Chance .  "Heart of Darkness" (1899), Marlow's story of his journey into the jungle to find Kurtz, the tormented white trader, becomes a multileveled commentary on colonialism, evil, and the unknown, emblemized in Kurtz's dying   "The horror!  The horror!"  The complex moral issues posed by these tales, and by "Typhoon" (1901), a masterpiece about a storm at sea, anticipated many of the concerns of the later twentieth century.  Francis Coppola appropriated Marlow and Kurtz for Apocalypse Now , his movie about the Vietnam War.