Best known for "Lord Jim" and "Heart of Darkness", Joseph Conrad wrote countless novels and stories, a number of which have been adapted to film, the somewhat lesser known "The Secret Sharer" being one of them.
Joseph Conrad was a man of three cultures: Polish, French, and English. Brought up in a Polish family and cultural environment ... he learned French as a child, and at the age of less than seventeen went to France, to serve ... four years in the French merchant marine. At school he must have learned German, but French remained the language he spoke with greatest fluency (and no foreign accent) until the end of his life. He was well versed in French history and literature, and French novelists were his artistic models. And yet he wrote all his books in English — the tongue he started to learn at the age of twenty.
In his "A Personal Record" he remarks that English was "the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions — of my very dreams!"
I can relate to that.
