Read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The novella inspired the movie "Apocalypse Now," directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

6 on lists

4 done

Add to my list Sign up to like

community notes

Be the first to share

Share progress, encouragement, and tips with everyone chasing this goal.

people also added

Who's doing it

This goal was mentioned in the Feature List:

The Ultimate Reading List: Modern Library's 100 Best Novels

See other Feature Lists.

About this

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad in which the sailor Charles Marlow tells his listeners the story of his assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior. The novel is widely regarded as a critique of European colonial rule in Africa, whilst also examining the themes of power dynamics and morality. Although Conrad does not name the river on which most of the narrative takes place, at the time of writing, the Congo Free State — the location of the large and economically important Congo River — was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is given a text by Kurtz, an ivory trader working on a trading station far up the river, who has "gone native" and is the object of Marlow's expedition.

This description uses material from the Wikipedia article on Heart of Darkness and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (view authors).