Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

After reading an 1836 newspaper account of a shipwreck and its two survivors, Edgar Allan Poe penned his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the story of a stowaway on a Nantucket whaleship who finds himself enmeshed in the dark side of life at sea: mutiny, cannibalism, savagery—even death. As Jeffrey Meyers writes in his Introduction: “[Poe] remains contemporary because he appeals to basic human feelings and expresses universal themes common to all men in all languages: dreams, love, loss; grief, mourning, alienation; terror, revenge, murder; insanity, disease, and death.” Within the pages of this novel, we encounter nearly all of them.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic reprints the text of the original 1838 American edition.

Jeffrey Meyers, a distinguished biographer, is the author of Edgar Allan Poe, D. H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad, among others. He lives in Berkeley, California.