Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) grew up amid political unrest in Russian-occupied Poland. After twenty years at sea with the French and British merchant navies, he settled in England in 1894. Over the next three decades he revolutionized the English novel with works such as Typhoon (1902), Youth (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Chance (1913), and Victory (1915).
“The Secret Agent is an astonishing book. It is one of the best—and
certainly the most significant—detective stories ever written.”
—Ford Madox Ford
“The Secret Agent is an altogether thrilling ‘crime story’ . . . a
political novel of a foreign embassy intrigue and its tragic human
outcome.” —Thomas Mann
“One of Conrad’s supreme masterpieces.” —F. R. Leavis
“[The Secret Agent] was in effect the world’s first political
thriller—spies, conspirators, wily policemen, murders, bombings . .
. Conrad was also giving artistic expression to his domestic
anxieties—his overweight wife and problem child, his lack of money,
his inactivity, his discomfort in London, his uneasiness in English
society, his sense of exile, of being an alien . . . The novel has
the perverse logic and derangement of a dream.”
—from the Introduction to the Everyman's Library edition by Paul
Theroux
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