The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the Star and Director of the Mercury Theater to tell you about the first presentation.

Mr Orson Wells.

Good evening.

There was a man called Koshinovsky, an agitator for Polish freedom in the 50s who was exiled by the czar.

On the journey his child was taken ill and when he begged an official to let him stop on his way to nurse it,

the official said not to bother. What's one

baby's life among all these thousands, said the official? If it's dying, leave it behind.

Luckily this expedient was found unnecessary. And the happy ending of the story is that little

Joseph Conrad Koshinovsky lived to drop his last name and to learn that careful

fortunate English which he practiced to the everlasting glory of our literature.

Tonight we present you with a dramatization of one of the best regarded and most typical of the works of Joseph Conrad.

The Heart of Darkness could be described as a deliberate masterpiece or a downright incantation.

A fine piece of prose work at the least.

Its best aspects are an artful compound of sympathy for humankind and a hide, tragical disgust.

Its successful contrivance of mood hides its craft as an octopus, hides in its own ink. And almost we are

persuaded that there is something, after all, something essential, waiting for all of us in the dark alley to the world

have originally loathsome immeasurable and certainly nameless.

That's Orson Wells in a 1938 radio broadcast of his adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Written in 1899, it didn't take long for the Heart of Darkness to become a widely read much interpreted work.

The short novel or novella as a haunting quality, and maybe that quality helped to contribute

to the legend in Hollywood that it was impossible to film.

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