The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is a novel by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, written and published in 1838. It is the only complete novel he finished.

The story is set in 1827 and 1828 and follows a young man who stows away aboard the Grampus, a whaler out of Nantucket, with the help of a friend. The voyage goes badly almost at once: a mutiny leaves him and a handful of others alive on a derelict ship, and hunger drives them to the sort of decision that the book describes without flinching. Pym is eventually rescued by the crew of the Jane Guy, and with them he sails onward, first into regions of ice and then towards a coast and a set of events that the narrative breaks off before explaining.

Poe built the book out of the travel writing and shipwreck accounts that were popular in his day, and it is often read as a hoax as much as a story, since it mixes material that reads as factual with things that plainly are not.

It is one of the few long works of prose Poe wrote, and it was left unfinished, which is why the account stops where it does.