The short fiction of Joseph Conrad is central to his literary achievement. Conrad wrote forty-three works of fiction, of which thirty-one are short, ranging from stories of a few pages to novellas of twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand words. His short fiction was usually published, after appearing in periodicals, in collections of three to six stories on related themes. Friend and fellow novelist Ford Madox Ford rightly observed that "Conrad never wrote a true short story." Avoiding the compact, well-made story popularized by Guy de Maupassant, Conrad preferred tales of "30,000 words or so," since the effects he aimed for, he explained to Blackwood's editor David Meldrum in 1902, "depend upon the reader looking back on my story as a whole." His best short works narrate extended and complex, yet unified, experiences.

Conrad's novels and stories transmute the adventures of his early life and evoke a godless universe rich in...