"Joseph Conrad. A Personal Remembrance" by the English novelist and critic Ford Madox Ford is a literary biography of the famous Polish writer Joseph Conrad who wrote in English. Joseph Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelist in English, with notable novels as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo etc. Ford Madox Ford was Conrad's close friend and collaborator. He wrote this biography as a work of art; in his own words:
"This then is a novel, not a monograph; a portrait, not a narration: for what it shall prove to be worth, a work of art, not a compilation. It is conducted exactly along the lines laid down by us, both for the novel which is biography and for the biography which is a novel. It is the rendering of an affair intended first of all to make you see the subject in his scenery. It contains no documentation at all; for it no dates have been looked up, even all the quotations but two have been left unverified, coming from the writer's memory. It is the writer's impression of a writer who avowed himself impressionist. Where the writer's memory has proved to be at fault over a detail afterwards out of curiosity looked up, the writer has allowed the fault to remain on the page; but as to the truth of the impression as a whole the writer believes that no man would careor dareto impugn it. It was that that Joseph Conrad asked for: the task has been accomplished with the most pious scrupulosity. For something human was to him dearer than the wealth of the Indies."
"This then is a novel, not a monograph; a portrait, not a narration: for what it shall prove to be worth, a work of art, not a compilation. It is conducted exactly along the lines laid down by us, both for the novel which is biography and for the biography which is a novel. It is the rendering of an affair intended first of all to make you see the subject in his scenery. It contains no documentation at all; for it no dates have been looked up, even all the quotations but two have been left unverified, coming from the writer's memory. It is the writer's impression of a writer who avowed himself impressionist. Where the writer's memory has proved to be at fault over a detail afterwards out of curiosity looked up, the writer has allowed the fault to remain on the page; but as to the truth of the impression as a whole the writer believes that no man would careor dareto impugn it. It was that that Joseph Conrad asked for: the task has been accomplished with the most pious scrupulosity. For something human was to him dearer than the wealth of the Indies."
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