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| The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket & Related Tales
| | Edgar Allan Poe
| The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is the only complete novel written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus. Various adventures & misadventures befall, including shipwreck, mutiny & cannibalism, before he's saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym & a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures further south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The novel ends abruptly as Pym & Peters continue towards the South Pole.
The story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it becomes increasingly strange & hard to classify. Poe, who intended to present a realistic story, was inspired by several real-life accounts of sea voyages, & drew heavily from Jeremiah N. Reynolds & referenced the Hollow Earth theory. He also drew from his own experiences at sea. Analyses of the novel often focus on the potential autobiographical elements as well as hints of racism & 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 1st published in the Southern Literary Messenger, tho never completed. The full novel was published in 7/1838 in two volumes. Some critics responded negatively to the work for being too gruesome & for cribbing heavily from other works, while others praised its exciting adventures. Poe himself later called it "a very silly book". Nevertheless, The Narrative became an influential work, notably for Herman Melville & Jules Verne.
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