Portraying a young man’s fi rst sea-voyage to the East in Youth, and the blind old age of Captain Whalley in The End of the Tether, the stories in this volume are united in their theme – the ‘Ages of Man’ – and in their scepticism. Conrad’s vision has infl uenced twentieth-century writers and artists from T. S. Eliot to Jorge Luis Borges and Werner Herzog, and continues to draw critical fi re.