was first published in 1899 as a three-part serial story in Blackwood's Magazine. Aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames the narrator, Charles Marlow, tells his fellow sailors how he became captain of a river steamboat for an ivory trading company on a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in the Heart of Africa.
Central to Conrad's work is the idea that there is little difference between "civilised people" and those described as "savages." The book provided the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now.