The novella, which likely has Conrad’s many gifts as a prose stylist to thank for its (comparatively) recent longevity, has, in general, been read as a scathing critique of European colonialism in Africa. And with it comes a varying range of views, critiques, and feelings. It remains, today, one of the most ubiquitous items on college course syllabi around the United Sates. Over the course of the past century, however, Conrad’s once-obscure work about a young man, Marlow, taking a trip down the Congo River, has become one of the most-assigned and most-discussed pieces in the canon. It was initially passed over in favor of works like Youth: A Narrative (1902) and The End of the Tether (1902) that history has largely left to fester. Of the three pieces of writing all bound into the single volume in which Heart of Darkness was sold, what would come to be the author’s most famous work received the least critical attention. During Joseph Conrad’s lifetime, little fuss was made over his 1899 novella Heart of Darkness.
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