The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by J. Gerald Kennedy 'And now I found these fancies creating their own realities, and all imagined horrors crowding upon me in fact.' The Narrative ofArthur Gordon Pym is an archetypal American story of escape from home and family which traces a young man's rite of passage through a series of terrible brushes with death during a fateful sea voyage. Apart from its violence and mystery, the tale calls attention to the act of writing and to the problem of representing truth. Pym—his only novel—has become the key text for our understanding of Poe. This edition offers eight additional tales which are linked to Pym by their treatment of persistent themes and by their ironic commentary on Poe's mystification of his readers. • INTRODUCTION • TEXTUAL NOTE • BIBLIOGRAPHY • CHRONOLOGY • EXPLANATORY NOTES