1894: Conrad returns to London

History.com has this for 14 January:

On this day in 1894, Joseph Conrad returned to London, England to settle down after a long career at sea. There he begins rewriting a story he had been working on during his travels, which becomes his first novel, Almayer’s Folly.
Conrad was born in Poland, named Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, the son of a Polish poet and patriot. Conrad’s father was arrested in 1861 for political activism and exiled to northern Russia. His wife and toddler son joined him. Both parents died of tuberculosis when Joseph was about twelve. An uncle raised him until the boy set out, at the age of seventeen, for Marseilles, France, where he joined the merchant marine and sailed to the West Indies. Conrad’s many harrowing adventures at sea inspired much of his work.
In 1878, when Conrad was 21, he traveled to England as a deck hand on a British freighter. He learned English during six voyages on a small British trade boat, then spent sixteen years with the British merchant navy. He had numerous adventures around the world, getting his first command in 1888. The following year, he commanded a Congo River steamboat for four months, which set the stage for his well-known story Heart of Darkness, published in 1902.
Almayer’s Folly was published in 1895. Conrad’s work progressively grew from hearty sea-adventure tales to sophisticated and pessimistic explorations of morals, personal choices, and character. His best-known works, including Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent, were published between 1900 and 1911, but he did not become financially secure from his fiction until late in his career. He died in 1924.

 

The most famous adaptation of Heart of Darkness is Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 motion picture, Apocalypse Now, which moves the story from the Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. In Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen plays Captain Benjamin L. Willard, an Army captain assigned to "terminate" the command of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. Marlon Brando played Kurtz, in one of his most famous roles. A production documentary of the film, titled Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, exposed some of the major difficulties which director Coppola (photo) faced in seeing the movie through to completion. The difficulties that Coppola and his crew faced mirrored some of the themes of the book.

Rico says that he, too, will probably not become 'financially secure from his fiction until late in his career', alas...