Polish-born English novelist and short-story writer, a dreamer, adventurer, and gentleman. In his famous preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), Joseph Conrad crystallized his often quoted goal as a writer: "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, above all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything." Among Conrad's best-known works are Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902). Conrad discouraged interpretation of his sea novels through evidence from his life, but several of his stories drew the material, events, and personalities from his own experiences in different parts of the world. While making his first voyages to the West Indies, Conrad met the Corsican Dominic Cervoni, who was later model for his characters filled with a thirst for adventure.

He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up – he had judged. 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth – the strange commingling of desire and hate.  (from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; originally published in Blackwood's Edinburg Magazine in 1899 and in book form in 1902)

Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, in the Ukraine, in a region that had once been a part of Poland, but was then under Russian rule. His father Apollo Korzeniowski was an aristocrat without lands, a poet and translator of Shakespeare and Dickens and French literature. At the time of Conrad's birth, the family estates had been sequestrated in 1839 following an anti-Russian rebellion. As a boy the young Joseph read with his father Polish and French versions of English novels, including translations of Charles Dickens and Captain Frederick Marryat. English was Conrad's third language; he learned to read and write in French before he knew English. Apollo Korzeniowski became embroiled in political activities. After being imprisoned for six months, he was sent to exile with his family to Volgoda, northern Russia, in 1861. Two years later the family was allowed to move to Kiev. Conrad suffered from a number of lung inflammations and epileptic seisuzes. Throughout the remainder of his life, he had health problems.

By 1869 Conrad's both parents had died of tuberculosis, and he was sent to Switzerland to his maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, who was to be a continuing influence on his life. On his death in 1894 Tadeusz left about £1,600 to his nephew - a sizable sum of money, well over £100,000 now. Conrad attended schools in Kraków and persuaded his uncle to let him go to the sea. In the mid-1870s he joined the French merchant marine as an apprentice, and made between 1875 and 1878 three voyages to the West Indies. During his youth Conrad also was involved in arms smuggling for the Carlist cause in Spain.

After being wounded in a duel or of a self-inflicted gunshot in the chest, Conrad continued his career at the seas in the British merchant navy for 16 years. He had been deeply in debt, and went into depression, but his uncle helped him out. This was a turning point in his life. Conrad rose through the ranks from common seaman to first mate, and by 1886 he obtained his master mariner's certificate, commanding his own ship, Otago. In the same year he was given British citizenship and he changed officially his name to Joseph Conrad, partly to avoid having to return to Poland and serve in the Russian military. Witnessing the forces of the sea, Conrad developed a deterministic view of the world, which he expressed in a letter in January 1898 to R. B. Cunninghame Graham: "What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well—but soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife—the tragedy begins. We can't return to nature, since we can't change our place in it." (The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 2: 1898-1902, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 30)

Conrad sailed to many parts of the world, including Australia, various ports of the Indian Ocean, Borneo, the Malay states, South America, and the South Pacific Island. In 1890 he sailed in Africa up the Congo River. The journey provided much material for his novel Heart of Darkness.

However, the fabled East Indies particularly attracted Conrad and it became the setting of many of his stories. By 1894 Conrad's sea life was over. During the long journeys he had started to write and Conrad decided to devote himself entirely to literature. At the age of 36 Conrad settled down in England. Conrad spoke English with a very strong Polish accent. Like a number of his countrymen, he had a natural dislike of Russia which went so far that he was antipathetic towards Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; the only Russian novelist he admired was Turgenev, who lived much of his career in France.

Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (1895),  about a derelict Dutchman, who trades on the jungle rivers of Borneo, was Conrad's debut as a novelist. "Until this book appeared I think the Malay Archipelago had escaped the new school of topographical novelists, but Mr. Conrad had succeeded so signally in reproducing rhe inert, soul-destroying life of the Javanese coast, and the stealthy antagonism between the white and native races, that it is to be hoped he will give us more work of the kind. . . ." (The Review of Reviews, 1 June 1895) With the publication of Chance (1913) Conrad began to achieve  general  popularity outside the literary circles. When the Titanic sank, he was asked by the editors of The English Review to write about the disaster.

Although Conrad is mostly known as a novelist, he tried his hand also as a playwright. His first one-act drama was not success - the audience rejected it. But after finishing the text he learned the existence of the Censor of the Plays, which inspired his satirical essay about an obscure civil servant. Conrad was an Anglophile, who regarded Britain as a land which respected individual liberties. As a writer he accepted the verdict of a free and independent public, but associated this official figure of censorship to the atmosphere of the Far East and the "mustiness of the Middle Ages," which shouldn't be part of the twentieth-century England.

Conrad married in 1896 Jessie George, an Englishwoman, by whom he had two sons. The couple first moved to Ashford, Kent. Except trips to France, Italy, Poland, and to the United States in 1923, Conrad lived in his new home country. In Poland he was regarded as a Pole writing in English.

Having published his first book with encouraging reviews, Conrad continued with the novel An Outcast of the Islands (1896), less assured in its use of English. The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' was a complex story of a storm off the Cape of Good Hope and of an enigmatic black sailor. Conrad began to work together with the critic and novelist Ford Madox Ford in the fall of 1898, at the Pent Farm, which had been rented by Ford and sublet to Conrad. Conrad, who mistook Ford for the gardener, made no impression on Ford. The situation changed with Romance (1903), on which they were collaborators.

"Three little villages are hidden among the hillocks and only the steeples of their churches can bee seen," Conrad described the landscape of the Pent in a letter to his cousin. "The colourung of the country presents brown and pale yellow tints—and in between, in the distance one can see the meadows, as green as emeralds. And not a sound is to be heard but the laboured painting of the engines of the London-Dover express trains." (The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 2: 1898-1902, p. 132) There he wrote the novella Heart of Darkness. 

While working on The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald re-read Conrad's famous preface to the book about making one hear, to feel, to see, and decided that his aim would be to take the Long Island atmosphere and make it real, "materialize it beneath unfamiliar skies". For his disappointment, Fitzgerald never met Conrad, though in May 1923 he paid homage to his idol with his friend Ring Lardner by singing and dancing in the middle of the night on the lawn outside Conrad's mansion.

Like Dostoevsky, Conrad was interested in the hidden self, but the quest of his characters and search for moral truths do not have a religious dimension. Lord Jim, narrated by Charlie Marlow, told about the fall of an young sailor and his redemption. Originally intended to be a short story, it was enlarged into a novel. It was partly based on true events: in 1880 a British captain and his crew abandoned the steamship Jeddah, carrying Muslim pilgrims, when the ship started to leak. Jeddah was brought by another steamship safely to port. Particular blame was attached to A.P. Williams, the first mate, who had organized the desertion of the vessel. The protagonist of Lord Jim is a British naval officer, who is haunted by guilt of cowardice, when he left his ship, Patna, in a storm without taking care of the passengers. During the voyage towards Mecca, the ship had hit a submerged object, and when the small crew lowers a lifeboat, Jim impulsively jumps in it. Contrary to the crew's beliefs, the ship did not sunk and Jim is left to stand in front of the Court of Inquiry. After disgrace Jim moves through a variety of jobs ashore and finds work as an agent at the remote trading post of Patusan. The misjudged Jim gains the confidence of chief Doramin and becomes a respected figure, proving that he is "inscrutable at heart." When Gentleman Brown and his fellow European adventurers appear, Jim promises Doramin that Brown and his men will leave the island without bloodshed. He is wrong, Doramin's son is killed, and Jim is finally forced to face his past-he allows himself to be shot by the grieving Doramin. "Doramin, struggling to keep his feet, made with his two supporters a swaying, tottering group; his little eyes stared with an expression of mad pain, of rage, with a fericious glitter, which the bystanders noticed, and then, whiile Jim stood stiffened and with bared head in the light of torches, looking him straight in the face, he clung heavily with his left arm round the neck of a bowed youth, and lifting deliberately his right, shot his son's friend through the chest." (Lord Jim: A Tale, Edinburg: William Blackwood and Sons, MDCCCC, pp. 449-450)

Heart of Darkness, written in 1899, was partly based on Conrad's four-month command of a Congo River steamboat. Published in Youth, a Narrative, and Two Other Stories (1902), it was first serialized in Blackwood's Magazinein 1899. Conrad had learned about atrocities made by Congo "explorers," and created in the character of Kurtz the embodiment of European imperialism. Also Commander R. H. Bacon, who travelled in Benin, described brutalities in his book: "Hundreds of human remains must have been here in every stage of decomposition, from the newly dead to the mouldering skull. It was a ghastly walk, guarded at the far end by a headless sacrifice of a huge man. It is useless to continue describing the horrors of the place, everywhere death, barbarity, and blood, and smells that it hardly seemed right for human beings to smell and yet live." (Benin: The City of Blood by R. H. Bacon,  London: Edward Arnold, 1897, p. 93) Moreover, Conrad was aware about Henry Morton Stanley's journey up the Congo river in the mid-1870s. Stanley's revelation of the commercial possibilities of the region had resulted in the setting up of a trading venture. However, in the novel the journey become analogous with a quest for inner truths - like in Henry Rider Haggard's novel She (1887). Conrad's vision has also drawn fierce criticism. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe described Conrad as a "thoroughgoing racist. This thin simple truth is glossed over in criticism of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unmarked. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. . . . Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?" ('An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,' Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, New York: Doubleday, 1989, pp. 11-12)

The narrator, again Marlow, who perhaps is not so reliable, depicts to his friends a trip into Africa, where he becomes curious about a man called Kurtz, an ivory trader. Marlow works for a company that is only interested in ivory and he witnesses the suffering of the native workers. He travels with his men up the Congo River to reach Kurtz, a first-class agent. In addition, Kurtz is said to be "a universal genius," "a prodigy," "an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else." As they near the inner station of the company, they are attacked, and Marlow's helmsman is killed. At the station they meet a Russian who idolizes Kurtz, who has made himself the natives' god and decorated the posts of his hut with human skulls. Marlow tries to get the seriously ill Kurtz away down the river, but Kurtz dies, his last words being, "The horror! The Horror!" At the end, back in Europe Marlow lies to Kurtz's fiancée: "The last word he pronounced was - your name."

Heart of Darkness has inspired several film version, starting from Orson Welles but his project for RKO never materialized. Kurtz fascinated Welles; a genius destroyed by inner conflicts, greatness gone wrong. During his career as a director and actor, Welles would play this kind of Faustian figure repeatedly, most notably as Citizen Kane, who also dies with a mysterious phrase on his lips. In a television performance from 1958 Boris Karloff was seen as Kurtz and Roddy McDowall as Marlow. Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) was based on the novella, Michael Herr's Dispatches, and John Milius' 1969 script. Nicolas Roeg's adaptation from 1993 followed Conrad's work closely. "In Apocalypse Now, the "horror" is symbolically repressed (killed), while in Heart of Darkness it is brought into the light, as horrible as it might be to do so. The film, then, accepts as a premise our capacity for evil, and goes ahead to show how the colonialist psychosis of Kurtz, and by extension Western culture, translates into a social nightmare. In such a world, the individual's confrontation with the evil within is less problematic than the spectacle of its wordly consequences." (from The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film by John C. Tibbets and James M. Welsh, foreword by Robert Wise, second edition, New York: Checkmark Books,  2005, p. 180)

In Youth (1902) the title story recorded Conrad's experiences on the sailing-ship Palestine. Nostromo (1904) was an imaginative novel which again explored man's vulnerability and corruptibility. It includes one of Conrad's most suggestive symbols, the silver mine. In the story the Italian Nostromo ("our man") is destroyed for his heroism like Lord Jim. With his death the secret of the silver is lost forever. The English director David Lean planned to film the book, and began to work with the screenplay with Christopher Hampton in 1986. However, the novel had been recommended to him years earlier by Robert Bolt, who replaced Hampton and eventually Lean himself took over the scriptwriting. When Steven Spielberg, who first agreed to produce the movie for Warner Bros., abandoned the project, Lean formed a partnership with Serge Silberman, the producer of Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and his other late films. "I thought Conrad was a very good match for David's temperament," Hampton recalled, "because he was very positive about individuals, but very pessimistic about the human race in general. Conrad was profoundly pessimistic about people in general and found consolation or hope in individuals; all his work was about valuable individuals being crushed by malign forces of people's inertia or greed." (David Lean: A Biography by Kevin Brownlow, New York: A Wyatt Book for St. Martin's Press, 1997, p. 716) Lean died in 1991 and the project was not realized.

The Secret Agent (1907) took a bleak view of prophets of destruction and utopians, but Conrad also once confessed, that "there had been moments during the writing of the book when I was an extreme revolutionist". Basically Conrad was not sympathetic with revolutionaries. The novel was dedicated to H.G. Wells.

The period between The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and Under Western Eyes (1911) is considered artistically Conrad's most productive. H.G. Wells encouraged Conrad and gave him good reviews and his work was also recognized by John Galsworthy. With Ford Madox Ford he wrote three books: The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), and The Nature of A Crime (1924). Following the completion of Under Western Eyes, in which he struggled with the themes of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, he fell into a feverish delirium and remained bed-ridden for the next three months. It was the last time he challenged Dostoevsky.

Although Conrad was prolific, his financial situation wasn't secure until 1913 with the publication of Chance. Last years of his life were shadowed by rheumatism. He refused an offer of knighthood in 1924 as he had earlier declined honorary degrees from five universities. Conrad died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924 and was buried in Canterbury. Conrad's influence upon 20th-century literature was wide. Ernest Hemingway expressed special admiration for the author, and his impact is seen in among others in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Koestler, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Louis-Ferdiand Céline, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Graham Greene. Bertrand Russell, who exchanged letters with him and named his son John Conrad, said: "Except for love of England and hatred for Russia, politics did not much concern him. What interested him was the individual human soul faced with the indifference of nature, and often with the hostility of man, and subject to inner struggles with passions both good and bad that led towards destruction. Tragedies of loneliness occupied a great part of his thought and feeling." (Autobiography by Bertrand Russell, London: Routledge, 2010, p. 202)

Several of Conrad's stories have been filmed. The most famous adaptations include Alfred Hitchcock's The Sabotage (1936), based on The Secret Agent, Richard Brooks's Lord Jim (1964), and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), based on Heart of Darkness. Conrad sold the American screen rights to his fiction in 1919. Next year he composed a screenplay entitled The Strange Man, based on the short story 'Gaspar Ruiz.' He did not like to work for the film business, and did not know about screenwritings. The studio rejected his script.

For further reading: The Sea-Dreamer by G. Jean-Aubry (1957); Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography by J.Baines (1960); The Sea Years of Joseph Conrad by Jerry Allen (1965); Joseph Conrad by Ford Madox Ford (1965); Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives by F.R. Karl (1979); Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle by Z. Najder (1983); Conrad Companion by N.A. Page (1986); Culture and Irony: Studies in Joseph Conrad's Major Novels by A Winner (1988); Joseph Conrad by Jeffrey Meyers (1990); Conrad's Existentialism by O. Bohlmann (1991); Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse by Richard Ambrosini (1991); Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition by Andrea White (1993); Joseph Conrad by M. Seymour-Smith (1995); The Invention of the West. Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire by Christopher Lloyd GoGwilt (1995); Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma by John W. Griffith (1995); The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. by J.H. Stape (1996); One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad by Geoffrey Galt Harpham (1996); Conrad on Film, ed. by Gene M. Moore (1998); Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness by Peter Edgerly Firchow (1999); 'Keeping the monster at bay: Joseph Conrad' in Dostoevsky and English Modernism, 1900–1930 by Peter Kaye (1999); Conrad, Language, and Narrative by Michael Greaney (2001); Rereading Conrad by Daniel R. Schwarz (2001; The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad by John Stape (2010); Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad,  edited by Agata Szczeszak-Brewer (2015); Outposts of Progress: Joseph Conrad, Modernism and Post-colonialism, edited by Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn and Jakob Lothe (2015); Conrad's Drama: Contemporary Reviews and Observations, edited by John G. Peters (2019); Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford: A Study in Collaboration by John Hope Morey; edited by Gene M. Moore (2021); Conrad's Decentered Fiction by Johan Adam Warodell (2022); Exile as a Continuum in Joseph Conrad's Fiction: Living in Translation by Ludmilla Voitkovska (2022)

Selected works:

• Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River, 1895
  - Tuulentupia (suom. Olli Kivilinna, 1919)
  - films:  La folie Almayer  (TV film 1973), dir. Vittorio Cottafavi, starring Giorgio Albertazzi, Rosemary Dexter, Paul Barge, Gianni Rizzo; La folie Almayer (2011), dir. Chantal Akerman, starring Stanislas Merhar, Marc Barbé, Aurora Marion, Zac Andrianasolo
• An Outcast of the Islands, 1896
  - film: Outcast of the Islands (1951), dir. by Carol Reed, screenplay William Fairchild, starring Trevor Howard, Ralph Richardson, Kerima, Robert Morley, Wendy Hiller, Kerima 
• The Nigger of the 'Narcissus': A Tale of the Sea, 1897 (US title: The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle, 1897)
  - "Narkissoksen" neekeri: meriromaani (suom. Jussi Tervaskanto, 1933)
• Tales of Unrest, 1898 (Karain, a Memory; The Idiots; An Outpost of Progress; The Return; The Lagoon)
  - films: An Outpost of Progress (1982), dir. Dorian Walker, starring Simon MacCorkindale, Thomas Hellberg and Kenneth Estes; Gabrielle (2005), based on The Return, prod. Azor Films, arte France Cinéma, Studio Canal, dir. Patrice Chéreau, starring Pascal Gregory, Isabelle Huppert, Claudia Coli
• Lord Jim: A Tale, 1900
  - Lordi Jim (suom. O. Kostiainen, 1930)
  - films: Lord Jim (1924), dir. by Victor Fleming, starring Percy Marmont, Shirley Mason and Noah Beery; Lord Jim (1964), prod. Columbia Pictures Corporation, Keep Films, written and dir. by Richard Brooks, starring Peter O'Toole, James Mason, Eli Wallach, Jack Hawkins, Paul Lucas, Daliah Lavi, Curt Jurgens, Akim Tamiroff
• The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, 1901 (with Ford Madox Ford)
• Youth, a Narrative, and Two Other Stories, 1902 (The End of the Tether; Heart of Darkness; Youth)
  - Pimeyden sydän (suom. Kristiina Kivivuori, 1968); Nuoruus ja muita kertomuksia (suom. Heikki Salojärvi, 1999); Liekaköyden pää (suom. Heikki Salojärvi, 2004)
  - films: Au bout du rouleau (TV film 1973), dir.  Claude-Jean Bonnardot, starring Charles Vanel, Etienne Bierry and Yves Arcanel; Au bout du rouleau (TV film 2002), dir. Thierry Binisti, starring Richard Bohringer, Jacques Bonnaffé, Ronnie Lazaro, Spanky Manikan; Apocalypse Now (1979), dir. by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Marlon Brando. Loosely based on Conrad's story. Screenplay by John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola. Apocalypse Now Redux (2001), an expanded version of Coppola's war epic. 196 minutes  ("But the film that captured the essence of the war more effectively than movies better grounded in historical reality is now definitely too long. A narrative thread that was almost too thin in the original is stretched to breaking point." Jonathan Foreman in The New York Post, August 3, 2001); Hearts of Darkness (1991), a documentary on the making of Coppola's film; Heart of Darkness (1993), dir. by Nicolas Roeg, starring Tim Roth and John Malkovich.
• Romance: A Novel, 1903 (with Ford Madox Ford)
  - film: The Road to Romance (1927), prod. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), dir. by John R. Robertson, starring Ramon Novarro, Marceline Day and Marc McDermott 
• Falk; Amy Foster; To-morrow: Three Stories, 1903  
• Typhoon and Other Tales, 1903
  - Pyörremyrsky (suom. Jorma Etto, 1961)
  - film: Amy Foster (1997), dir. Beeban Kidron, screenplay Tim Willocks, starring Rachel Weisz, Vincent Perez, Ian McKellen, Kathy Bates 
• Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, 1904
  - Hopealaiva (suom. Heidi Järvenpää, 1959) / Nostromo: kertomus rannikolta (suom. Arvi Tamminen, 1991) 
  - films: The Silver Treasure (1926), dir. Rowland V. Lee, starring George O'Brien, Jack Rollens and Helena D'Algy; Nostromo (TV mini-series 1997), dir. by Alastair Reid, starring Claudio Amendola, Albert Finney, Colin Firth, Serena Scott Thomas, Claudia Cardinale, Lothaire Bluteau, Robert Escobar, Joaquim de Almeida, and Ruben Rabasa
• The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions, 1906
• The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale , 1907
  - Anarkistit: yksinkertainen tarina (suom. Kristiina Kivivuori, 1961)
  - films: Sabotage (1936) dir. by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Sylvia Sydney, Oscar Homolka, Desmond Tester, John Loder, Joyce Barbour; The Secret Agent (1996), dir. by Christopher Hampton, starring Bob Hoskins, Patricia Arquette, Gérard Depardieu, Jim Broadbent, Robin Williams ("I have seen two film on two consecutive nights. The first (in both sense), according to the director himself, was "inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent." Even without his statement, however, I must admit that I would have stumbled upon the connection he reveals, but never that respiratory and divine verb inspire. Skillful photography, clumsy filmmaking - these are my indifferent opinions "inspired" by Hitchcock's latest film." Jorge Luis Borges in Total Library, 1999); The Secret Agent (TV film 1967),  dir. Gerald Blake, starring Nigel Green, Mary Webster and Dennis Waterman; The Secret Agent (TV film 1975), dir. Herbert Wise, starring Robert Hardy and Paul Rogers; The Secret Agent (1996), dir. Christopher Hampton, starring Bob Hoskins, Patricia Arquette and Gérard Depardieu
• The Point of Honor: A Military Tale, 1908 (illustrations by Dan Sayre Groesbeck; first serialized as The Duel: A Military Story in The Pall Mall Magazine, 1908)
  - The Duell (1977), prod. Enigma Productions, National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC), dir. by Ridley Scott, starring Keith Carradine, Harvey Keitel, Albert Finney, Edward Fox, Cristina Raines 
• A Set of Six, 1908 (Gaspar Ruiz; The Informer; The Brute; An Anarchist; The Duel; Il Conde)
  - Voimaihminen: vaiheita Chilen vapautussodasta (suom. V. Hämeen-Anttila, 1913) 
• The Secret Sharer, 1910
  - films: Face to Face (1952), dir. by John Brahm, Bretaigne Windust, adaptation by James Agee, starring James Mason, Gene Lockhart and Michael Pate; Der heimliche Teilhaber (TV film 1965), dir. Günther Fleckenstein; The Secret Sharer (1967), dir. Larry Yust, starring Aron Kincaid and David Soul
• Under Western Eyes: A Novel, 1911
  - film: Sous les yeux d'occident (1936), dir. by Marc Allégret, starring Pierre Fresnay, Danièle Parola, Michel Simon, Jacques Copeau
• 'Twixt Land & Sea: Tales, 1912 (A Smile of Fortune - Harbour Story; The Secret Sharer - An Episode from the Coast; Freya of the Seven Isles)
• Some Reminiscences, 1912 (US title: A Personal Record, 1912)
• Chance: A Tale in Two Parts, 1913
• Victory: An Island Tale, 1915
  - films: Victory (1919), dir. by Maurice Tourneur, starring Jack Holt, Seena Owen and Wallace Beery; Dangerous Paradise (1930), dir. by William Wellman, starring Nancy Carroll, Richard Arlen, Warner Oland; Dans une île perdue (1931), dir. Alberto Cavalcanti; Tropennächte (1931), dir. Leo Mittler; Farornas paradis (1931), dir. Rune Carlsten; La riva dei bruti (1931), dir. Mario Camerini; Victory (1940), dir. by John Cromwell, starring Fredric March, Betty Field, Cedric Hardwicke; Des Teufels Paradies (1987), dir. Vadim Glowna; Victory (1995), dir. by Mark Peploe, starring Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill, Irène Jacob
• Within the Tides: Tales, 1915 (The Planter of Malata; The Partner; The Inn of the Two Witches; Because of the Dollars)
  - film: Laughing Anne (1953), based on the short story Because of the Dollars, prod. Herbert Wilcox Productions, dir. Herbert Wilcox, starring Wendell Corey, Margaret Lockwood, Forrest Tucker, Ronald Shiner
• The Shadow-Line: A Confession, 1917
  - Rajaviiva (suom. Heikki Salojärvi, 2010)
  - film: Smuga cienia (1976), prod. Thames Television, Zespól Filmowy "X", dir. Andrzej Wajda, starring Marek Kondrat, Graham Lines and Tom Wilkinson
• The Arrow of Gold, 1919
• Autocracy and War, 1919 (first serialized in The Fortnightly Review, 1905)
• One Day More: A Play in One Act, 1919
• The Shock of War: Through Germany to Cracow, 1919 (first serialized in The Daily News & Leader, 1915)
• Tradition, 1919 (first serialized in The Daily Mail, 1918)
• Prince Roman, 1920 (serialized as The Aristocrat in The Metropolitan Magazine, 1912)
• The Warrior's Soul, 1920
• The Rescue: A Romance of the Shallows, 1920
  - film: The Rescue (1929), prod. The Samuel Goldwyn Company, dir. by Herbert Brenon, screenplay H.H. Caldwell, Katherine Hilliker, Elizabeth Meehan, starring Ronald Colman, Lili Damita, Alfred Hickman, Theodore von Eltz
• The Works of Joseph Conrad, 1920-21
• Notes on Life & Letters, 1921
• Notes on My Books, 1921
• The Dover Patrol. A Tribute, 1922
• Laughing Anne, A Play, 1923
• The Secret Agent: A Drama in Three Acts, 1923
• The Rover, 1923
  - film: L'avventuriero / The Rover (1967), prod. Arco Film, American Broadcasting Company (ABC), Selmur Productions, dir. Terence Young, starring Anthony Quinn, Rosanna Schiaffino and Rita Hayworth
• The Nature of a Crime, 1924 (with Ford Madox Ford)
• The Shorter Tales of Joseph Conrad, 1924
• Laughing Anne & One Day More: Two Plays by Joseph Conrad, 1924 (with an introduction by John Galsworthy) 
• Suspense, 1925 (with an introduction by Richard Curle)
• Five Letters, 1925
• Tales of Hearsay, 1925 (with a preface by R.B. Cunninghame Graham)
• Joseph Conrad’s Diary of His Journey up the Valley of the Congo in 1890, 1926
• Last Essays, 1926
• Joseph Conrad’s Letters to His Wife, 1927
• Conrad to a Friend, 1928
• Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895-1924, 1928 (edited, with introduction and notes, by Edward Garnett)
• Letters: Joseph Conrad to Richard Curle, 1928 (edited, with an introduction and notes, by R.C.)
• The Sisters, 1928 (unfinished; with an introduction by Ford Madox Ford)
• Conrad’s Prefaces to His Works, 1937
• Letters of Joseph Conrad to Marguerite Poradowska, 1890-1920, 1940
• The Portable Conrad, 1947 (ed., with an introd. and notes by Morton Dauwen Zabel)
• Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum, 1958 (edited by William Blackburn)
• Joseph Conrad on Fiction, 1964 (edited by Walter F. Wright)
• Conrad’s Manifesto: Preface to a Career; the History of the Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus," with Facsimiles of the Manuscripts, 1968 (edited with an essay by David R. Smith)
• Joseph Conrad’s Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, 1969 (edited by C. T. Watts)
• Three Novels, 1970 (with an introd. by Edward W. Said)
• Notes by Joseph Conrad; Written in a Set of His First Editions in the Possession of Richard Curle, with an Introd. and Explanatory Comments, 1974 (with a pref. by Jessie Conrad)
• Selected Tales from Conrad, 1977 (edited with an introduction and commentary by Nigel Stewart)
• Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces, 1978 (edited and with comments by Zdzislaw Najder)
• The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, 1983-2007 (9 vols., edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies)
• The Complete Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad, 1991-92 (3 vols., edited with an introduction by Samuel Hynes)
• Selected Works of Joseph Conrad, 1994 (edited by Steven J. Kasdin)
• The Portable Conrad, 2007 (edited with an introduction by Michael Gorra
• An Outcast of the Islands, 2016 (edited by Allan H. Simmons; The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad)
  
• The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad, 2015 (edited by Laurence Davies)
  
• The Secret Agent: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, 2017 (edited by Richard Niland)
  
• The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story: The Nature of a Crime, 2021 (Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford; edited by Jeremy Hawthorn, with the assistance of Max Saunders)
  
• A Set of Six, 2021 (edited by Allan H. Simmons and Michael Foster; introduction and notes by Owen Knowles and Allan H. Simmons)
  
• The End of the Tether and Other Tales, 2022 (edited with an introdution and notes by Philip Davis)