Nostromo

This eBook edition of "NOSTROMO: A TALE OF THE SEABOARD" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard is a 1904 novel, set in the fictitious South American republic of "Costaguana". Conrad set his novel in the mining town of Sulaco. The book has more fully developed characters than any other of his novels, but two characters dominate the narrative: Señor Gould and the eponymous anti-hero, the "incorruptible" Nostromo. In his "Author's Note" Conrad relates how, as a young man of about seventeen, while serving aboard a ship in the Gulf of Mexico, he heard the story of a man who had stolen, single-handedly, "a whole lighter-full of silver". But Conrad forgot about the story until some twenty-five years later when he came across a travelogue in a used bookshop in which the author related how he worked for years aboard a schooner whose master claimed to be that very thief who had stolen the silver. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "I'd rather have written Nostromo than any other novel." Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties. He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. Contents: Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard Memoirs & Letters: A Personal Record; or Some Reminiscences The Mirror of the Sea Notes on Life & Letters Biography and Critical Essays: Joseph Conrad (A Biography) by Hugh Walpole Joseph Conrad by John Albert Macy A Conrad Miscellany by John Albert Macy Joseph Conrad by Virginia Woolf