It is, in my view, the masterwork of that ‘puissant rêveur,’ as Gustav[e] Kahn once called Conrad….one of the few mastering visions of our historical moment and our human lot.”—Robert Penn Warren [4] Conrad, like other artists, faced constraints arising from the need to propitiate his audience and confirm their own favourable self-regard. This may account for his describing the admirable crew of the Judea in his 1898 story " Youth" as " Liverpool hard cases", whereas the crew of the Judea's actual 1882 prototype, the Palestine, had included not a single Liverpudlian, and half the crew had been non-Britons; [175] and for Conrad's transforming the real-life 1880 criminally negligent British captain J. L. Clark, of the SS Jeddah, in his 1900 novel Lord Jim, into the captain of the fictitious Patna—"a sort of renegade New South Wales German" so monstrous in physical appearance as to suggest "a trained baby elephant". [176] Similarly, in his letters Conrad—during most of his literary career, struggling for sheer financial survival—often adjusted his views to the predilections of his correspondents. [177] Throughout almost his entire life Conrad was an outsider and felt himself to be one. An outsider in exile; an outsider during his visits to his family in the Ukraine; an outsider—because of his experiences and bereavement—in [Kraków] and Lwów; an outsider in Marseilles; an outsider, nationally and culturally, on British ships; an outsider as an English writer.... Conrad called himself (to Graham) a "bloody foreigner." At the same time... [h]e regarded "the national spirit" as the only truly permanent and reliable element of communal life. [171] The epic scale of Nostromo and its thematic orchestration is subtle and complex.”Conrad questioned what lesser writers would take for granted—writes Cedric Waits, one of his best commentators—; and his questioning was so intelligent that even now, so long after [ Nostromo’s] first appearance, the novel generally rings true.”

Conrad's later letters to literary friends show the attention that he devoted to analysis of style, to individual words and expressions, to the emotional tone of phrases, to the atmosphere created by language. In this, Conrad in his own way followed the example of Gustave Flaubert, notorious for searching days on end for le mot juste—for the right word to render the "essence of the matter." Najder opines:

Possible answer:

He wrote oftener about life at sea and in exotic parts than about life on British land because—unlike, for example, his friend John Galsworthy, author of The Forsyte Saga—he knew little about everyday domestic relations in Britain. When Conrad's The Mirror of the Sea was published in 1906 to critical acclaim, he wrote to his French translator: "The critics have been vigorously swinging the censer to me.... Behind the concert of flattery, I can hear something like a whisper: 'Keep to the open sea! Don't land!' They want to banish me to the middle of the ocean." [68] Writing to his friend Richard Curle, Conrad remarked that "the public mind fastens on externals" such as his "sea life", oblivious to how authors transform their material "from particular to general, and appeal to universal emotions by the temperamental handling of personal experience". [123] Quoted in Introduction by Martin Seymour-Smith. Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Ed. Martin Seymour-Smith. New York: Penguin, 1990. 7.

Joseph Conrad wrote Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard between 1902 and 1904, the year of its publication, in the middle of his “major phase.” Lord Jim ( 1900), Heart of Darkness ( 1899; 1902), and two collaborations with Ford Madox Hueffer were behind him; The Secret Agent ( 1907) lay ahead. The composition was, even by Conrad’s standards, a ghastly ordeal: “I see nothing, I read nothing. It is like a kind of tomb which is also hell where one must write, write, write.” He was beset by gout, depression, and financial collapse. The work grew from a projected short-story into his longest novel. When Nostromo appeared, first as a serial in T.P.’s Weekly (January to October 1904) and then, significantly revised, as a book, it failed to win critical or public approval. Rather, it initiated a losing streak which, stretching through The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes ( 1911), was only broken by Chance ( 1913), his first major financial success. Even today, Nostromo is far from his most-read work, though it holds critical pride of place not only as Conrad’s greatest achievement, but among the front-rank of modernist novels, and as a key fictional study of post-colonial global capitalism. Because of the father's attempts at farming and his political activism, the family moved repeatedly. In May 1861 they moved to Warsaw, where Apollo joined the resistance against the Russian Empire. He was arrested and imprisoned in Pavilion X [note 9] of the Warsaw Citadel. [28] Conrad would write: "[I]n the courtyard of this Citadel—characteristically for our nation—my childhood memories begin." [29] On 9 May 1862 Apollo and his family were exiled to Vologda, 500 kilometres (310mi) north of Moscow and known for its bad climate. [30] In January 1863 Apollo's sentence was commuted, and the family was sent to Chernihiv in northeast Ukraine, where conditions were much better. However, on 18 April 1865 Ewa died of tuberculosis. [31]Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, [note 4] though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. [10] His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, [11] have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events. [note 5]