Lord Jim (The Modern Library, No. 186)

ix, 417 pp. Introduction by J. Donald Adams. "Perhaps the most popular of all his novels, Lord Jim is undoubtedly Joseph Conrad's most exciting adventure story. Its theme of a heroic man victimized by his own integrity and destroyed by his sense of lost honor is one of the most appealing in the literature of idealism. All the powers of a great descriptive artist and a thinker concerned with courage and devotion and the crises of conscience are lavished upon this tale of a man who stakes his life on a high a principle and loses. 'I will have no favorites,' Conrad wrote to an admirer, 'but I do not feel grieved that you prefer Lord Jim to all my other books.'"