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.