The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838)

Poe's only complete novel. A young man stows away on a whaling ship and encounters mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism, and increasingly bizarre discoveries as the voyage presses deeper into the Antarctic — culminating in one of literature's most mysterious and debated endings.

Historical Significance:
Published in 1838, Arthur Gordon Pym was Poe's attempt to write a longer work that would bring him the financial success his short stories had not. The novel failed commercially, and Poe dismissed it as "a very silly book." But its influence has been extraordinary: Jules Verne wrote a sequel (An Antarctic Mystery, 1897), Herman Melville drew on it for Moby-Dick, H.P. Lovecraft incorporated its Antarctic imagery into At the Mountains of Madness, and Jorge Luis Borges was obsessed with its enigmatic final pages. The novel's abrupt, hallucinatory ending — a vast white figure rises from the Antarctic sea — has generated 180 years of interpretation and remains one of literature's great unsolved mysteries.

This public domain classic was originally published in 1838. Free to read and share.