You think you know Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness even if you haven't read it in years, or ever. It's been widely taught in school, so its most famous lines ring with musty familiarity. Its plot has been adapted for all manner of media, though usually in wildly divergent stories, sometimes in parody. It's part of modern culture. The popular notion is it's the story of a European ivory trader who has gone native in the jungles we take to be Africa (although the continent is never specified). This view may have been helped along in recent decades by the film Apocalypse Now, which was said to be based on Conrad's short novel, substituting America for Europe and Southeast Asia for Africa.