Joseph Conrad's Inspiration for Nostromo

Joseph Conrad provides a detailed explanation of the inspirational origins of his novel. There he relates how, as a young man of about 17 while serving aboard a ship in Gulf of Mexico.

It was originally published serially in two volumes of T.P.'s Weekly. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Nostromo 47th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It is frequently regarded as amongst the best of Conrad's long fiction; F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "I'd rather have written Nostromo than any other novel."

In his Author's Note to early editions of Nostromo, Joseph Conrad provides a detailed explanation of the inspirational origins of his novel. As Conrad goes on to relate, he forgot about the story until some twenty-five years later when he came across a travelogue in a used-book shop in which the author related how he worked for years aboard a schooner whose master claimed to be that very thief who had stolen the silver.