โ Scribed by Poe, Edgar Allan
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
When Edgar Allan Poeโs only novella was first published in 1838, the reviews were slow in coming and dismissive when they arrived. The bookโs failure left Poe in such dire financial straits that he even accepted a job at one of the magazines that had panned it. But The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket has since become one of his most influential works: Baudelaire translated it, Paul Theroux read it out loud to Jorge Luis Borges, Jules Verne wrote a sequel to it, H. P. Lovecraft drew on it in creating his own tales of the Antarctic . . .
Ostensibly, itโs a classic adventure story about a young boy who runs away to sea and encounters all the classic scenarios: mutinies, storms, shipwrecks, ravenous sharks, hostile natives. And Poe drew on many contemporary accounts of exploration in the South Seas to give his story a sense of verisimilitude.
But there are far deeper currents at work in the book than mere adventure: elements of the supernatural as they near the South Pole, evocations of the protagonistsโ experiences at sea that rival Poeโs best tales of horror, and a disturbing ending that continues to stir debate.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
EDGAR ALLAN POE was born the son of itinerant actors in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1809. A year after his birth, his father abandoned the family, and his mother died of tuberculosis. Poe was taken into foster care by John Allan, a successful merchant in Richmond, Virginia. He attended the University of Virginia for a year, but left after running up severe gambling debts, which led to an estrangement from his foster family. In 1827, while a private in the U.S. Army, he published his first book of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems. After his discharge, he pursued a literary career and found editorial jobs at a series of periodicals, including the Southern Literary Messenger , which serialized The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. He became well-known as a scathing critic, and his reviews earned him the epithet โTomahawk Man.โ In 1835, Poe secretly married his cousin Virginia Clemm, but despite nonstop writingโcriticism, poetry, short stories, and experimentation with fictional genres, including the detective novel, which he virtually invented with the publication of โThe Murders in the Rue Morgueโ (1841)โhe received scant recognition for his efforts until the publication of โThe Ravenโ in 1845. The poemโs instant popularity gave him new visibility in literary circles, but his personal situation remained plagued by poverty and drink, and the illness and ultimate death of Virginia in 1847. In 1849, he was found semiconscious outside a Baltimore tavern. Taken to the hospital, he lingered for four days but never recovered. On October 7, Poe died at the age of forty.
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
{ Oct 2020 - epub revisions. Verified ebook for complete book description, cover, table of contents, content separation, and epub format error checking. } Paperback, 288 pages Published 1838 Introduction by: Richard Kopley (1999) Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon P
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, s
"So tempting an opportunity of solving the great problem in regard to an Antarctic continent had never yet been afforded to man..." A stowaway aboard the whaling ship Grampus, Arthur Gordon Pym finds himself bound on an extraordinary voyage to the high southern latitudes. Poe's remarkable novel rec