The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

by Edgar Allan Poe, Philip Dossick (Editor)

Overview

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym* is a short novel by the master, whose extravagantly macabre tales have inspired such latter-day disciples as H.P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King. Pym follows the bizarre adventures of young Arthur Gordon Pym, a stowaway aboard the whaling ship 'Grampus.'

Part sea story, part adventure story, part horror story, a young man runs away to sea and gets more than he bargained for, including mutiny, shipwreck, and cannibalism. A classic adventure story with supernatural elements, Pym has fascinated and influenced generations of writers including Herman Melville, Jules Verne, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs.


"Pym's magic endures. In more popular writing, Arthur Conan Doyle, B Traven, and David Morrell all found a touchstone in Poe's only novel. Baudelaire translated it. Jules Verne wrote a sequel. When Paul Theroux, who reports the story in The Old Patagonian Express (1979), read aloud from it to Jorge Luis Borges, the older writer said: "It is Poe's greatest book."

--Robert McCrum


EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) has yet to be surpassed as the greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale. Since their first publication in the 1830s and 1840s, Poe's grotesque and sublime tales of mystery and madness have established themselves as masterworks of fiction.


*Listed by The Guardian #10 on its list of the 100 greatest novels.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940149980727
Publisher:	Kizra Books
Publication date:	01/27/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	440
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was orphaned at the age of three and adopted by a wealthy Virginia family with whom he had a troubled relationship. He excelled in his studies of language and literature at school, and self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in 1827. In 1830, Poe embarked on a career as a writer and began contributing reviews and essays to popular periodicals. He also wrote sketches and short fiction, and in 1833 published his only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Over the next five years he established himself as a master of the short story form through the publication of "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and other well–known works. In 1841, he wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," generally considered the first modern detective story. The publication of The Raven and Other Poems in 1845 brought him additional fame as a poet.