In this authoritative, insightful biography, we see the modernist master Joseph Conrad as a man who consistently reinvented himself. Born in 1857 in the Ukraine, he left home early and worked as a sailor, traveling to the Far East and Africa, and eventually settled in England, beginning a precarious existence as a novelist. John Stape describes a man with a deep sense of otherness, a writer who wrote in his third language and whose fiction became the cornerstone of modernism. With his exceptional understanding of Conrad, Stape succeeds in casting a new light on the life of a man who remains one of the greatest writers of his, and our, time.