This chillingly prophetic examination of terrorism by the author of Heart of Darkness is the literary precursor to the espionage thrillers of Graham Greene and John Le Carre.

Inspired by an actual attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, The Secret Agent portrays the world of late-nineteenth-century London, with its fatuous civil servants, corrupt police, and squalid underworld characters like Verloc, a pornographer acting as a government informant. Verloc’s assignment is to provoke the radicals whose group he has penetrated into committing an act of such violence that they will be discredited and their appeal to the masses destroyed. With its questionable characters and amoral caricatures, the novel is as much a black satire of English society as a frightening mirror of the present day.

With an Introduction by E. L. Doctorow and a New Afterword by Debra Romanick Baldwin


About the Author:

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) lived a life as fantastic as any of his fiction. His aristocratic parents were ardent Polish patriots who died when he was a child as a result of their revolutionary activities. Conrad went to sea at sixteen, taught himself English, and gradually worked his way up until he passed his master’s examination and was given command of merchant ships in Asia and on the Congo River. At the age of thirty-two, he decided to try his hand at writing. Although his work won the admiration of critics, sales were small. He was a nervous, introverted, gloomy man for whom writing was an agony, but he was rich in friends who appreciated his genius, among them Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Ford Madox Ford.