Nostromo: Original and Unabridged - Tapa blanda

This is the original and unabridged text of Nostromo, a Joseph Conrad classic ranked as one of the best English-language novels of the 20th century.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "I'd rather have written Nostromo than any other novel."

Nostromo is set in the fictional South American country of Costaguana, in the port city of Sulaco. Costaguana has a long history of tyranny, revolution and warfare, but has recently experienced a period of stability under the dictator Ribiera.

Charles Gould is a native Costaguanero of English descent who owns an important silver-mining concession. He is tired of the political instability in Costaguana and its concomitant corruption, and uses his wealth to support Ribiera's government, which he believes will finally bring stability to the country after years of misrule and tyranny by self-serving dictators. Instead, Gould's refurbished silver mine and the wealth it has generated inspires a new round of revolutions and self-proclaimed warlords, plunging Costaguana into chaos. Among others, the forces of the revolutionary General Montero invade Sulaco after securing the inland capital; Gould, adamant that his silver should not become spoil for his enemies, orders Nostromo, the trusted "capataz de los cargadores" (head longshoreman) of Sulaco, to take it offshore so it can be sold into international markets.

Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 11–12 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. Although granted British nationality he always considered himself a Pole. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, his works are viewed as modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and many others. Films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Victory, The Shadow Line, and The Rover. Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while plumbing the depths of the human soul. Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries.