HEART OF DARKNESS

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time &bull Nominated as one of America&rsquos best-loved novels by PBS&rsquos The Great American Read

Introduction by Caryl Phillips
Commentary by H. L. Mencken, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Lionel Trilling, Chinua Achebe, and Philip Gourevitch

Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this century&rsquos most enduring works of fiction. Written several years after Joseph Conrad&rsquos grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo, the novel is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin line between civilization and barbarity. This edition contains selections from Conrad&rsquos Congo Diary of 1890&mdashthe first notes, in effect, for the novel, which was composed at the end of that decade. Virginia Woolf wrote of Conrad: &ldquoHis books are full of moments of vision. They light up a whole character in a flash. . . . He could not write badly, one feels, to save his life.&rdquo