Full name: Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance

Author: Ford Madox Ford Year: 1965 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Biographies, Free books Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads FadedPage Amazon ISBNs: 9780880011761 0880011769

Determined not to write a biography about his friend Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) in the usual dry style, Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) instead produced a novel. Like his fictional narrators, he has an imperfect memory: he places the beginning of their acquaintance several years after they first collaborated, and skims over their later acrimony. But in the place of verifiable facts is a wealth of vivid detail. Ford describes Conrad's remarkably long-eared horse, his haphazard use of adverbs and their fraught collaboration over their second joint novel, Romance, during which Ford's carefully unexciting style provoked the adventure-loving Conrad to depression. Despite inaccuracies, Ford's impressionistic portrayal of Conrad as an elegant, likeable swindler and "beautiful genius" strikes a far richer chord than a purely historical account. First published in 1924, just after Conrad's death, this work remains a striking example of creative non-fiction, instructive for scholars and students of English literature. Similar books: Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas Like the Roman by Simon Heffer Memoirs by Pablo Neruda Unbreak My Heart by Toni Braxton R. E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman The Way It Was by Eliot Weisman Amazing Faith by Michael Richardson John Wayne by Scott Eyman Albert Camus by Catherine Camus Max Perkins by A. Scott Berg Once Blind by Kay Marshall Strom Genius in Disguise by Thomas Kunkel Ben Hogan by James Dodson The Life and Diary of David Brainerd by David Brainerd Roosevelt in the Bad Lands by Hermann Hagedorn Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul Fante by Dan Fante The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte by Syrie James Koestler by Michael Scammell