Author Joseph Conrad was born JĆ³zef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 in what is now Ukraine. He was of Polish descent.
His father, Apollo NalÄcz Korzeniowski, was a poet and an ardent Polish patriot who was a member of the committee that went on to direct the 1863 Polish insurrection against Russian rule. Apollo was arrested in late 1861 and was sent into exile at Vologda in northern Russia. His wife, Ewa Korzeniowski, and four-year-old son followed him there.
After both his parents died from tuberculosis (his mother in 1865 and his father in 1869), Conrad was an orphan at age 11. He was put under the care of his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, a lawyer, who sent him to school at KrakĆ³w and then to Switzerland. In 1874 the teenage Conrad left school for Marseille to go to sea.