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’s later work may not altogether do justice to it, and critics have begun to reassess that work and to challenge the assumption that it is wholly substandard. Yet despite how one judges the quality of Conrad’s output during his last decade, what is clear is that the popularity of that work led to belated appreciation of his earlier books as well as numerous reprintings of them, most notably in the form of a pair of prematurely titled “collected editions” that were published in Britain and America in 1920 and 1921. Riding the crest of his popular success, in 1923 he embarked on a reading tour in the United States, where for the first time he found himself a center of public interest. In the following year, his mounting accolades in Britain culminated in the offer of a knighthood, although, in keeping with his propensity for turning down public honors, he declined to accept it. He died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924, at the age of sixty-six, and was buried near his home in a Roman Catholic cemetery in Canterbury. Although his reputation ebbed slightly in the years after his death, by the 1940s he was generally acknowledged to be among a handful of the greatest writers of his era, an estimation that has never faltered since.

“Youth,” “Amy Foster,” and “The Secret Sharer”

For both practical and artistic reasons, the short story form was important to Conrad. On the practical side, before he became a popular success, it provided the chronically debt-ridden author with a more dependable source of income than did the novel form; both in Britain and America, magazines during this era tended to pay well for short fiction, whereas selling a novel was always a dicey proposition. Yet he was also deeply invested in the short story as an aesthetic form, as was the case with several of the authors whom he most admired, such as Guy de Maupassant. Unlike Maupassant’s compact, elliptical stories, however—and despite his own assertion that “[i]t takes a small-scale narrative (short story) to show the master’s hand” (Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 124)—Conrad’s stories tend to be long and richly detailed, and, as his creative imagination was constantly at work reshaping and augmenting his material, they invariably threatened to evolve into novellas and even full-scale novels. In fact, nearly all of his novels were initially envisioned as short stories. In his entire career, to the consternation of his publishers and his literary agent, he brought only one work of fiction in at the length he had projected (the 1897 short story “The Lagoon”), and he completed very few works by the times to which he had agreed. Writing either to a set length or to a deadline was anathema to this temperamental artist.

The three short stories included in this volume are generally recognized to be among Conrad’s finest examples of the genre. As is the case with much of his fiction, all three stories deal with the theme of the dangers of sea travel, a preoccupation that stems from his first career as a seaman. Further, all three stories demonstrate Conrad’s proclivity for transmitting information through the refracting lenses of specific subjectivities—in the case of “Youth” and “Amy Foster” (each of which is a frame-tale narrative, or a story within a story), multiple subjectivities. Yet despite these thematic and formal similarities, they also present Conrad in three different modes, and each displays different of his skills. While reading any one of these stories on its own is illuminating, for reasons that are detailed below, when read together they yield considerably more than the sum of their parts.

“Youth” (1898) consists of the reminiscences of the English seaman Charlie Marlow, Conrad’s most famous narrator, to a group of his friends, one of whom subsequently passes the story on to the reader. The outlook Marlow here recalls—in sharp contrast to that of the next of Conrad’s tales he will narrate, the broodingly pessimistic Heart of Darkness —is unencumbered by introspection and psychological conflict. Yet this is not to say that the story runs no deeper than the insights of its reckless, twenty-year-old protagonist (whose limited outlook the wistful, now forty-two-year-old Marlow scrupulously reproduces); on the contrary,