Typhoon and Other Stories

Conrad began writing the four short stories that would comprise Typhoon and Other Stories while he was attempting to complete the third and final story for the proposed collection Youth, A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (1902) for William Blackwood and Sons. Setting aside “The End of the Tether”- and after finishing his novel Lord Jim (1900) - Conrad penned in quick succession “Typhoon”, “Falk”, “Amy Foster” and “Tomorrow.”^[3][4][5]

Written at the personal request of publisher William Heinemann, Conrad was nominally subject to an arrangement permitting Blackwood publishing in Maga a “first refusal” for all his new stories. This awkward situation induced Conrad to enlist the services of a literary agent, J. B. Pinker. Pinker procured a substantially higher fee for the serialization of “Typhoon” and Amy Foster from other journals than offered by Blackwood.^[6]

Literary critic Laurence Graver notes the impact of Conrad’s disengagement from Blackwood and his reliance on Pinker:

…Conrad took less and less direct interest in the magazine [that published] his work. After he stopped writing for Blackwood’s, his fiction generally appeared in magazines of high circulation and low quality. But although he boasted of his obedience to artistic rather than financial compulsions, Conrad never became wholly indifferent to the restrictive pressure of periodical publishing.^[7]

• Baines, Jocelyn. 1960. Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York. ISBN 978-0297167556
• Graver, Laurence. 1969. Conrad’s Short Fiction. University of California Press, Berkeley, California. ISBN 0-520-00513-9