Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all
time - Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The
Great American Read
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."