Joseph Conrad, who was born in the Ukraine in 1857, brought up in Poland and schooled in the merchant marine, died near Canterbury in 1924, having become a major British novelist of the period 1895-1920. John Batchelor's biography of this enigmatic figure uses archive material, as well as published sources, to reveal the close relationship, at every stage of Conrad's writing career, between the life and the work. Conrad was both depressive and delinquent. He manipulated friends, such as Ford Madox Ford, Edward Garnett and John Galsworthy, into relationships that went at least some way to meeting his urgent psychological needs. He suffered from virulent writer's block, and would accept substantial advances from publishers and his agent, J.B. Pinker, for works which he then found himself unable or unwilling to write. Many of his best-known works, Heart of Darkness , Lord Jim and Nostromo, for example, can be seen as forms of escape from uncongenial duties. Batchelor's study, which includes an account of the complex and fugitive Polish background, reveals Conrad as being one of the most tormented and self-defeating of Britain's literary figures.