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The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
of the Folio Club in the 1830s. The collection would be unified as a series of tales presented by members of a literary association based on the Delphian Club, designed as burlesque of contemporary literary criticism. Poe had previously printed several of these stories in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and the Baltimore Saturday Visiter.

An editor, James Kirke Paulding, tried to assist him in publishing this collection. However, Paulding reported back to Poe that the publishers at Harper & Brothers declined the collection, saying that readers were looking for simple, long works like novels. They suggested, “if he will lower himself a little to the ordinary comprehension of the generality of readers, and prepare… a single work… they will make such arrangements with him as will be liberal and satisfactory.” They suggested “if other engagements permit… undertake a Tale in a couple volumes, for that is the magical number.” The response from Harper & Brothers inspired Poe to begin a long work and began writing The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Poe arranged with his boss at the Southern Literary Messenger to publish his novel in several serialized installments at a pay rate of $3 per page.

However, Poe retired from his role at the Messenger on January 3, 1837, as the installments were being published; some scholars suggest he was fired and this led him to abandoning the novel. His split with the Messenger began a “blank period” where he did not publish much and suffered from unemployment, poverty, and no success in his literary pursuits. Poe soon realized writing a book-length narrative was a necessary career decision, partly because he had no steady job and the economy was suffering from the Panic of 1837. He also set part of the story as a quest to Antarctica to capitalize the public’s sudden interest in that topic.

After his marriage to Virginia Clemm, Poe spent the following winter and spring completing his manuscript for this novel in New York. He earned a small amount of money by taking in a boarder named William Gowans. During his fifteen months in New York, amidst the harsh economic climate, Poe published only two tales, “Von Jung, the Mystific” and “Siope. A Fable”. Harper & Brothers announced Poe’s novel would be published in May 1837, but the Panic forced them to delay.

The novel was finally published in book form under the title The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in July 1838, although it did not include Poe’s name and was instead presented as an account by Pym himself. Poe excused the earlier serialized version by noting that the Messenger had mistakenly adapted it “under the garb of fiction”. As Harper & Brothers recommended, it was printed in two volumes. Its full subtitle was:

Comprising the Details of Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827. With an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivers; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; Their Deliverance by Means of the British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of this Latter Vessel in the Atlantic Ocean; Her Capture, and the Massacre of Her Crew Among a Group of Islands in the Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Farther South to Which That Distressing Calamity Gave Rise.

The first overseas publication of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket appeared only a few months later when it was printed in London without Poe’s permission, although the final paragraph was omitted. This early publication of the novel initiated British interest in Poe.

Literary significance and reception

Contemporary reviews for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket were generally unfavorable. Fifteen months after its publication, it was reviewed by Lewis Gaylord Clark, a fellow author who carried on a substantial feud with Poe. His review printed in The Knickerbocker said the book was “told in a loose and slip-shod style, seldom chequered by any of the more common graces of composition.” Clark went on, “This work is one of much interest, with all its defects, not the least of which is that it is too liberally stuffed with ‘horrid circumstances of blood and battle.'”

Many reviewers commented on the excess of violent scenes. In addition to noting the novel’s gruesome details, a review in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (possibly William Evans Burton himself) criticized its borrowed descriptions of geography and errors in nautical information. The reviewer considered it a literary hoax and called it an “impudent attempt at humbugging the public” and regretted “Mr. Poe’s name in connexion with such a mass of ignorance and effrontery”. Poe later wrote to Burton that he agreed with the review, saying it “was essentially correct” and the novel was “a very silly book”.

Other reviews condemned the attempt at presenting a true story. A reviewer for the Metropolitan Magazine noted that, though the story was good as fiction, “when palmed upon the public as a true thing, it cannot appear in any other light than that of a bungling business—an impudent attempt at imposing on the credulity of the ignorant.” Nevertheless, some readers believed portions of Poe’s novel were true, especially in England, and justified the absurdity of the book with an assumption that author Pym was exaggerating the truth. Publisher George Putnam later noted that “whole columns of these new ‘discoveries’, including the hieroglyphics (sic) found on the rocks, were copied by many of the English country papers as sober historical truth.”

In contrast, 20th-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who admitted Poe as a strong influence, praised the novel as “Poe’s greatest work”. He later included one of the species invented for the story in his dictionary of fantastical creatures, the Book of Imaginary Beings, in a chapter titled “an animal dreamt by Poe”. H. G. Wells noted that “Pym tells what a very intelligent mind could imagine about the south polar region a century ago”.

Even so, most scholars did not engage in much serious discussion or analysis of the novel until the 1950s, though many in France recognized the work much earlier. In 2013, The Guardian cited The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket as one of the 100 best novels written in English, and noted its influence on later authors such as Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, B. Traven and David Morrell.

The financial and critical failure of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was a turning point in Poe’s career. For one, he was driven to literary duties that would make him money, notably his controversial role as editor of The Conchologist’s First Book in April 1839. He also wrote a short series called “Literary Small Talk” for a new Baltimore-based magazine called American Museum of Science, Literature and the Arts.

In need of work, Poe accepted a job at the low salary of $10 per week as assistant editor for Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, despite their negative review of his novel. He also returned to his focus on short stories rather than longer works of prose; Poe’s next published book after this, his only completed novel, was the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840.

Influence and legacy

19th century

Scholars, including Patrick F. Quinn and John J. McAleer, have noted parallels between Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and other Poe works. Quinn noted that there were enough similarities that Melville must have studied Poe’s novel and, if not, it would be “one of the most extraordinary accidents in literature”. McAleer noted that Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” inspired “Ahab’s flawed character” in Moby-Dick. Scholar Jack Scherting also noted similarities between Moby-Dick and Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle”.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket became one of Poe’s most-translated works; by 1978, scholars had counted over 300 editions, adaptations, and translations. This novel has proven to be particularly influential in France. French poet and author Charles Baudelaire translated the novel in 1857 as Les Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym. Baudelaire was also inspired by Poe’s novel in his own poetry. “Voyage to Cythera” rewrites part of Poe’s scene where birds eat human flesh.

French author Jules Verne greatly admired Poe and wrote a study, Edgar Poe et ses œuvres, in 1864. Poe’s story “Three Sundays in a Week” may have inspired Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). In 1897, Verne published a sequel to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket called An Antarctic Mystery. Like Poe’s novel, Verne attempted to present an imaginative work of fiction as a believable story by including accurate factual details. The two-volume novel explores the adventures of the Halbrane as its crew searches for answers to what became of Pym. Translations of this text are sometimes titled The Sphinx of Ice or The Mystery of Arthur Gordon Pym.

An informal sequel to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is the 1899 novel A Strange Discovery by Charles Romeyn Dake, where the narrator, Doctor Bainbridge, recounts the story his patient Dirk Peters told him of his journey with Gordon Pym in Antarctica, including a discussion of Poe’s poem “The Raven”.

20th century

Prince Amerigo in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl (1904) recalled The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: “He remembered to have read as a boy a wonderful tale by Allan Poe … which was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans could have: the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who … found … a thickness of white air … of