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Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard is a 1904 novel by Joseph Conrad, set in the fictitious South American republic of "Costaguana". It was originally published serially in monthly instalments of T.P.'s Weekly.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Nostromo 47th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It is frequently regarded as amongst the best of Conrad's long fiction; F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "I'd rather have written Nostromo than any other novel."
Conrad set his novel in the town of Sulaco, a port in the western region of the imaginary country Costaguana.
In his "Author's Note" to later editions of Nostromo, Joseph Conrad provides a detailed explanation of the inspirational origins of his novel. There he relates how, as a young man of about seventeen, while serving aboard a ship in the Gulf of Mexico, he heard the story of a man who had stolen, single-handedly, "a whole lighter-full of silver". As Conrad goes on to relate, he forgot about the story until some twenty-five years later when he came across a travelogue in a used-book shop in which the author related how he worked for years aboard a schooner whose master claimed to be that very thief who had stolen the silver.
Fox Film produced a lavish silent film version in 1926 called The Silver Treasure directed by Rowland V. Lee and starring George O'Brien. It is now a lost film.
In 1991, British director David Lean was to film the story of Nostromo, with Steven Spielberg producing it for Warner Bros., but Lean died a few weeks before the principal photography was to begin in Almería. Marlon Brando, Paul Scofield, Peter O'Toole, Isabella Rossellini, Christopher Lambert and Dennis Quaid had all been set to star in this adaptation, along with Georges Corraface in the title role.
NOSTROMO
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