HEART OF DARKNESS follows Charles Marlow, an Englishman working for a trading company as a ferry-boat captain in the colonial Congo Free State, transporting ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. The story is set against the backdrop of the colonial atrocities committed when the Congo was the personal property of Belgian King Leopold II.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) was a British writer of Polish descent; he became a British subject in 1886. Popular during the noontide of the British Empire, Conrad had been a sailor and usually wrote about nautical or seaboard topics. His experiences with the horrors of colonialism in the Congo influenced his seminal work HEART OF DARKNESS.