Nostromo’s poor reception was due largely to its difficulty, a product not so much of its many characters or the complexity of the story itself, but of the plotting: “the book,” said The Times Literary Supplement, “is overwhelmed by machinery.” Nostromo begins in medias res and a great deal of the tale-the history of the land, the backstory and motivations of the characters, even the climax-is related through flashbacks and metadiegetic retellings. Even today, Nostromo is far from his most-read work, though it holds critical pride of place not only as Conrad’s greatest achievement, but among the front-rank of modernist novels, and as a key fictional study of post-colonial global capitalism. Rather, it initiated a losing streak which, stretching through The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes ( 1911), was only broken by Chance ( 1913), his first major financial success. When Nostromo appeared, first as a serial in T.P.’s Weekly (January to October 1904) and then, significantly revised, as a book, it failed to win critical or public approval.

The work grew from a projected short-story into his longest novel. It is like a kind of tomb which is also hell where one must write, write, write.” He was beset by gout, depression, and financial collapse. The composition was, even by Conrad’s standards, a ghastly ordeal: “I see nothing, I read nothing. Joseph Conrad wrote Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard between 19, the year of its publication, in the middle of his “major phase.” Lord Jim ( 1900), Heart of Darkness ( 1899 1902), and two collaborations with Ford Madox Hueffer were behind him The Secret Agent ( 1907) lay ahead.

“It is, in my view, the masterwork of that ‘puissant rêveur,’ as Gustav Kahn once called Conrad….one of the few mastering visions of our historical moment and our human lot.”-Robert Penn Warren “ne of the finest of all English historical novels”-Terry Eagleton. “The greatest novel in English of this century”-Walter Allen. “I’d rather have written Conrad’s Nostromo than any other novel”-F.

Nostromo 1904