A silver mine in an invented South American republic, a run of politics that nobody controls, and an incorruptible Italian foreman whom everyone trusts with everything. Conrad said the book cost him more than any other and left him ill for months; he invented the country, its history, its newspapers and its coastline entire. The silver is the only character in it that gets what it wants. Fifty-six plates of nineteenth-century sea and mountain painting by Frederic Edwin Church and Winslow Homer give the novel's invented seaboard its weather.
