The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: and Collected Writings

by Edgar Allan Poe

“My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.”

In his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Edgar Allan Poe carries his knack for the mysterious and macabre, spilt blood and cryptic messages onto the South Seas. Aboard a whaling ship, stowaway Pym will endure starvation, cannibalism, whirlpools, mad dogs and premature burials on a journey toward the frozen expanse of Antarctica.

Published the year full emancipation was legalized by the UK’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, Arthur Gordon Pym captures the relentless anxiety and violence of pre-Civil War American expansion. Allegorical, tragic, and based on real events, this adventure story went on to inspire many authors from Herman Melville and Jules Verne, to H.G. Wells and Vladmir Nabokov. This edition also includes accompanying selected letters, essays, and criticism from Poe himself.

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 22, 2025

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

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Reviews

[Brooke Bitzan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I spent the entire time I was reading this book convinced that I was doing a horrible job of noticing the literary devices being used by Poe but once I read the conversation between Wolff and Rezek at the end I realized I actually had been picking up on a decent amount of the messaging happening throughout the story.

I honestly had a blast reading The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket. What I find most interesting is that technically speaking, none of the individual scenes in this novel were all that wild, but when you put it together, it does turn out kind of batshit. The whiplash you get going back and forth between scenes of imminent death and then very technical descriptions of life at sea would be enough by itself to make it crazy but the way Poe chose to end the story is truly the cherry on top.

I think that there are some really interesting analysis to be done through a racial lens and I'm excited to look more into the works mentioned that already do so because do think it's a more complicated analysis than it looks like at surface level.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

By page 33, there had already been entombment, a mutiny, intoxication, and a rabid dog. It was amazing and awful and funny and weird. And very meta! After, I read the Pym chapter from Toni Morrison's brilliant Playing in the Dark.