Serialized in Ford Madox Ford’s English Review in 1908–9, A Personal Record (1912) both documents and fictionalizes Conrad’s early life and the opening stages of his careers as a writer and as a seaman. It is also an artistic and political manifesto.

A Personal Record is an autobiographical work (or "fragment of biography") by Joseph Conrad, published in 1912. Notoriously unreliable and digressive in structure, it is nonetheless the principal contemporary source for information about the author’s life. It tells about his schooling in Russian Poland, his sailing in Marseille, the influence of his Uncle Tadeusz, and the writing of Almayer’s Folly.

Joseph Conrad（3 December 1857 – 3 August 1933) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England.He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English sensibility into English literature.