Basis
Georges Antoine Klein may have been the real-life individual upon whom Joseph Conrad based the character Kurtz. (The name Klein means "small" in Dutch & German, while Kurtz, i.e. kurz means "short".) Klein was an employee of the Brussels-based trading company Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, and died shortly after being picked up on the steamboat Conrad was piloting.
In his history book King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild suggests that Leon Rom was one of the inspirations for the Mr. Kurtz character, citing references as the heads on the stakes outside of the station and other similarities between the two.
Conrad also expressed an admiration of Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific writings, in particular the stories "The Beach of Falesá" and The Ebb-Tide, as well as the non-fiction account of Tembinok' of the Gilbert Islands that appeared in In the South Seas. All three texts contain megalomaniacs who manipulate their circumstances and remote settings to assert power over others. It is widely believed that Conrad drew influence from these characters, as well as Stevenson's plot lines, when writing Heart of Darkness.
Read more about this topic: Kurtz (Heart Of Darkness)
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