The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

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.

In conversation with

Nate Wolff is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at Tufts University. He is the author of Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age (Oxford University Press, 2019), which provides a literary prehistory of today's emotional politics: the cynicism and exhaustion of democratic life in an age of inequality and corruption. His writing has appeared in American Literary History, English Literary History, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and The Washington Post.

Joseph Rezek received his PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his B. A. from Columbia University. His area of expertise is British and American literature from 1750 to 1850, and his research focuses on early Black Atlantic literature, transatlantic studies, and the history of race and racism. He teaches at Boston University.