Hugh Walpole (1884 - 1941) interviewed his much admired friend Joseph Conrad (1884 - 1941) for the pages of a fashionable American magazine and came away these very warm prose:
"There is a mystery first of the man himself-- the mystery that the son of a Polish nobleman should run away to sea, learn English from old files of the 'Standard' newspapers when he was thirty, toss about the world as an English seaman, finally share with Thomas Hardy the title of the greatest living English novelist--- what kind of man can this be?"
