The Secret Agent

Description

Inspired by an actual attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 - often called the first modern terrorist act - this chillingly prophetic novel is the literary precursor to the espionage thrillers of such writers as Graham Greene and John le Carr . The Secret Agent offers a devastating portrait of late 19th-century London, with its fatuous civil servants, amoral politicians and corrupt police, who are mirrored by their counterparts in the criminal underworld.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) lived a life as fantastic as any of his fiction. His aristocratic parents were ardent Polish patriots who died when he was a child as a result of their revolutionary activities. Conrad went to sea at sixteen, taught himself English, and gradually worked his way up until he passed his master's examination and was given command of merchant ships in Asia and on the Congo River. At the age of thirty-two, he decided to try his hand at writing. Although his work won the admiration of critics, sales were small. He was a nervous, introverted, gloomy man for whom writing was an agony, but he was rich in friends who appreciated his genius, among them Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Ford Madox Ford. E. L. Doctorowis the author of numerous acclaimednovels, includingRagtime, World's Fair,andBilly Bathgate. Debra Romanick Baldwin is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at the University of Dallas, where she teaches the western literary tradition from Homer and Dante to Woolf and Bellow. Past President of the Joseph Conrad Society of America, she has written over a dozen articles and essays on Conrad, as well as on Flannery O'Connor, St. Augustine, and Primo Levi.

"The Secret Agent is an astonishing book. It is one of the best-and certainly the most significant-detective stories ever written." -Ford Madox Ford "The Secret Agent is an altogether thrilling 'crime story' . . . a political novel of a foreign embassy intrigue and its tragic human outcome." -Thomas Mann "One of Conrad's supreme masterpieces." -F. R. Leavis "[The Secret Agent] was in effect the world's first political thriller-spies, conspirators, wily policemen, murders, bombings . . . Conrad was also giving artistic expression to his domestic anxieties-his overweight wife and problem child, his lack of money, his inactivity, his discomfort in London, his uneasiness in English society, his sense of exile, of being an alien . . . The novel has the perverse logic and derangement of a dream." -from the Introduction to the Everyman's Library edition by Paul Theroux