Overview

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written and published in 1838, is the only complete novel by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The novel is set between 1827 and 1828 and relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaler called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures farther south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile, black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue toward the South Pole. The story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify. Poe, who intended to present a realistic story, was inspired by several real-life accounts of sea voyages, and drew heavily from J. N. Reynolds and referenced the Hollow Earth theory. He also drew from his own experiences at sea. Analyses of the novel often focus on possible autobiographical elements as well as its portrayal of race and the symbolism in the final lines of the work. Difficulty in finding literary success early in his short story-writing career inspired Poe to pursue writing a longer work. A few serialized installments of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket were first published in the Southern Literary Messenger, though never completed. The full novel was published in July 1838 in one volume.

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Edgar Allan Poe is famed for his unsettling short stories, but he also wrote a full-length novel, his only one: The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Framed as the recollections of an adventurous stowaway, Pym begins as a swashbuckling adventure novel, and after growing increasingly weirder, ends on a surreal note worthy of the best of Poe's short stories.Despite Poe himself calling it a ""a very silly book,"" Pym went on to become one of his most-translated and influential works, coloring the themes of future adventure and weird fiction writers like Jules Verne and H. P. Lovecraft. It continues to influence writers to this day.

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