Volume 31, Number 3 · March 1, 1984
Conrad by Daylight
By Frederick C. Crews
Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle
by Zdzislaw Najder, translated by Halina Carroll-Najder
Rutgers University Press, 647 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The moment when a definitive biography appears would seem to be especially risky for the fortunes of any writer. Take, for instance, the Nobel prizewinner Sinclair Lewis, whose already waning reputation can scarcely be said to have survived Mark Schorer's comprehensive Sinclair Lewis: An American Life of 1961. In that case the biographer himself fell to wondering publicly why he had lavished a decade on such an unimposing figure, and most readers who struggled through his bulky tome must have felt as though they were watching a once-brilliant rocket tumbling awkwardly and irrevocably to earth. Both Schorer and his audience had learned too much. Why bother oneself further with a man who was so contemptibly understandable as a product of his callow and bumptious age?
Review, 4312 words
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