Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language.[231] After the publication of Chance in 1913, he was the subject of more discussion and praise than any other English writer of the time. He had a genius for companionship, and his circle of friends, which he had begun assembling even prior to his first publications, included authors and other leading lights in the arts, such as Henry James, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, John Galsworthy, Galsworthy's wife Ada Galsworthy (translator of French literature), Edward Garnett, Garnett's wife Constance Garnett (translator of Russian literature), Stephen Crane, Hugh Walpole, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells (whom Conrad dubbed "the historian of the ages to come"[232]), Arnold Bennett, Norman Douglas, Jacob Epstein, T. E. Lawrence, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Maurice Ravel, Valery Larbaud, Saint-John Perse, Edith Wharton, James Huneker, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, Józef Retinger (later a founder of the European Movement, which led to the European Union, and author of Conrad and His Contemporaries). In the early 1900s Conrad composed a short series of novels in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford.[233]
In 1919 and 1922 Conrad's growing renown and prestige among writers and critics in continental Europe fostered his hopes for a Nobel Prize in Literature. It was apparently the French and Swedes—not the English—who favoured Conrad's candidacy.[234] [note 38]
Conrad's Polish Nałęcz coat-of-armsIn April 1924 Conrad, who possessed a hereditary Polish status of nobility and coat-of-arms (Nałęcz), declined a (non-hereditary) British knighthood offered by Labour Party Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.[note 39] [note 40] Conrad kept a distance from official structures—he never voted in British national elections—and seems to have been averse to public honours generally; he had already refused honorary degrees from Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Yale universities.[108]
In the Polish People's Republic, translations of Conrad's works were openly published, except for Under Western Eyes, which in the 1980s was published as an underground "bibuła".[236]
Conrad's narrative style and anti-heroic characters[10] have influenced many authors, including T. S. Eliot,[8] Maria Dąbrowska,[237] F. Scott Fitzgerald,[238] William Faulkner,[238] Gerald Basil Edwards,[239] Ernest Hemingway,[240] Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,[237] André Malraux,[237] George Orwell,[241] Graham Greene,[238] William Golding,[238] William Burroughs,[182] Saul Bellow,[182] Gabriel García Márquez,[238] Peter Matthiessen,[note 41] John le Carré,[238] V. S. Naipaul,[238] Philip Roth,[242] Joan Didion,[182] Thomas Pynchon[182] J. M. Coetzee,[238] and Salman Rushdie.[note 42] Many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's works.
