Joseph Conrad 's reputation as a literary figure of major proportions rests entirely on his fiction. In relation to this large canon his dramatic works are incidental, derivative, and slight in volume. But the modest achievement in drama of such a significant author must not be neglected.

It is extraordinarily odd that one of the most important novelists of twentieth-century writing in English should have been born in Berdyczów in the Polish Ukraine and raised speaking Polish and French. Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. His father, Apollo, was a member of the gentry and intellectual class. A fervent Polish nationalist at a time when greater Poland subsisted under Russian "autocracy" (as Conrad put it), he was convicted of seditious activities and sent into exile in Russia in 1862. His wife Ewelina (also called Ewa) died there two years later when Conrad was...