Poe’s novel was also an influence on H. P. Lovecraft, whose 1936 novel At the Mountains of Madness follows similar thematic direction and borrows the cry tekeli-li or takkeli from the novel. Chaosium’s role-playing adventure Beyond the Mountains of Madness (1999), a sequel to Lovecraft’s novel, includes a “missing ending” of Poe’s novel, in which Pym encounters some of Lovecraft’s creatures at their Antarctic city.
René Magritte’s 1937 painting Not to Be Reproduced depicts an 1858 French edition of Poe’s book in the lower right of the work.
Another French sequel was La Conquête de l’Eternel (1947) by Dominique André.
Georges Perec’s 1969 novel A Void, notable for not containing a single letter e, contains an e-less rewriting of Poe’s “The Raven” that is attributed to Arthur Gordon Pym in order to avoid using the two es found in Poe’s name.
On May 5, 1974, author and journalist Arthur Koestler published a letter from reader Nigel Parker in The Sunday Times of a striking coincidence between a scene in Poe’s novel and an actual event that happened decades later: In 1884, the yacht Mignonette sank, with four men cast adrift. After weeks without food, they decided that one of them should be sacrificed as food for the other three, just as in Poe’s novel. The loser was a young cabin boy named Richard Parker, coincidentally the same name as Poe’s fictional character. Parker’s shipmates, Tom Dudley and Edwin Stephens, were later tried for murder in a precedent-setting English common law trial, the renowned R v Dudley and Stephens.
In Paul Theroux’s travelogue The Old Patagonian Express (1979), Theroux reads parts of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket to Jorge Luis Borges. Theroux describes it in this book as being the “most terrifying” story he had ever read.
In Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985), the lead character Quinn has a revelation that makes him think of the discovery of the strange hieroglyphs at the end of Poe’s novel.
In a 1988 Young All-Stars comic book written by Roy and Dann Thomas, Arthur Gordon Pym is a 19th-century explorer who discovered the lost Arctic civilization of the alien Dyzan. Pym goes on to become Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, eventually sinking the RMS Titanic. This story also uses elements of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel Vril.
21st century
Yann Martel named a character in his Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi (2001) after Poe’s fictional character, Richard Parker. Mat Johnson’s 2011 novel Pym, a satirical fantasy exploring racial politics in the United States, draws its inspiration from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and closely models the original.
Funeral doom band Ahab based their 2012 album The Giant on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
A character named Arthur Gordon Pym appears in the 2023 miniseries, The Fall of the House of Usher, as the attorney for the Usher family. Repeated references are made to his story of origin, said to have happened in his youth. It is stated that the character of Arthur Pym stops telling the story of his trip before his journey to the South Pole, alluding to the ending of the original novel. The character is played by Mark Hamill.
