Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master stylist, both lush and precise, who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. A Personal Record is Conrad's account of himself, his cultural background, and the central motives in his life as a seaman and a writer separated from the country where he was born.