Edited sentence: Achebe's point of view, now the single most famous piece of criticism on Joseph Conrad, is that Heart of Darkness and indeed most other works by Conrad should be discarded from the Western canon.In 1975, Chinua Achebe published an essay entitled "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness", wherein he labelled Joseph Conrad as a "bloody racist" (later revised to a "thoroughgoing racist").This essay has since sparked a storm of controversy surrounding Heart of Darkness and spreading to cover Conrad's other works as well.Whether or not Conrad was a racist, however, is mitigated somewhat by the question of whether or not he was more racist than the average of his time--and in this sense, at least, Heart of Darkness was a very progressive work.While this view is not universally accepted, it is nearly impossible to find an essay published on Heart of Darkness that does not attempt to tackle the issue of racism, and Achebe's essay directly, overshadowing all other critical discussion