"THE HORROR! THE HORROR!": FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE OF CONRAD'S YOUTH, CONTAINING THE FIRST BOOK APPEARANCE OF HEART OF DARKNESS
CONRAD, Joseph. Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902. Octavo, original green cloth.
First edition, first issue, containing the first appearance in book form of Heart of Darkness—"one of the most powerful short novels in the English language" (Farrow, 14). A beautiful copy.
"Youth" and "Heart of Darkness" were the first of Conrad's stories to attract wider attention. Conrad's "account of a superman running an ivory business in the heart of the Congo… is a masterpiece of sinister deterioration" (Connolly, Modern Movement 14). "A vast body of critical commentary has mined the dense richness and consciously paradoxical quality of this seminal modernist work, with its modern version of a Dantean journey into the Inferno, its Faustian figure of Kurtz provoking ambivalently fascinated horror… The influence of Heart of Darkness can be traced in writers as diverse as T.S. Eliot, Andre Gide, H.G. Wells, Chinua Achebe, William Golding, Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul, and George Steiner, while Francis Coppola's film Apocalypse Now taps some of its rich imaginative possibilities by transposing it to the Vietnam War" (Stringer, 292). Also contains Conrad's story "The End of the Tether." First issue, with 32 pages of publisher's advertisements dated "10/02." Cagle A7a.1. Wise 10. Bookplate, small bookseller ticket.
Interior fine, very faint and tiny ink marks near foot of cloth spine. A beautiful copy in very nearly fine condition.