Joseph Conrad came to writing after having been a sailor for nearly twenty years.  The three long stories in this volume were composed early in his literary career, a few years after a grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo as the commander of a river steamer.  "Youth" (1898) is the first of Conrad's stories to feature Captain Marlow, later the narrator of "Heart of Darkness", Lord Jim, and Chance.  "Heart of Darkness" (1899), Marlow's story of his journey into the jungle to find Kurtz, the tormented white trader, becomes a multileveled commentary on colonialism, evil, and the unknown, emblemized in Kurtz's dying words:  "The horror!  The horror!"  The complex moral issues posed by these tales, and by "Typhoon" (1901), a masterpiece about a storm at sea, anticipated many of the concerns of the later twentieth century.  Francis Coppola appropriated Marlow and Kurtz for Apocalypse Now, his movie about the Vietnam War.