The novel is seen as an allegory about isolation and solidarity, the ship's company serving as a microcosm of a social group. Conrad appears to suggest that humanitarian sympathies are, at their core, feelings of self-interest and that a heightened sensitivity to suffering can be detrimental to managing a society.
In the United States, the novel was first published with the title The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle, at the insistence by the publisher, Dodd, Mead and Company, that no one would buy or read a book with the word nigger in its title, not because the word was deemed offensive but that a book about a black man would not sell.
Conrad began Nostromo as a short story but it became his longest novel. Published in 1904 by Harper and Brothers, London, it had appeared in serialized form in T.P.ís Weekly. Conrad fell behind in the serialization and his friend and fellow writer Ford Madox Ford wrote sixteen pages of Chapter 5.
This book is annotated with a biography about the life and times of Joseph Conrad.
