This book looks at the inception, composition, and 1907 publication of The Secret Agent, one of Joseph Conrad s most highly regarded political novels and a core text of literary modernism. David Mulry examines the development and revisions of the novel through the stages of the holograph manuscript, first as a short story, then as a serialized sensation fiction in Ridgway s Militant Weekly for the American market, before it was extensively revised and published in novel form. Presciently anticipating the climate of modern terror, Conrad s text responds to the failed...