The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 in Boston to a family of poor actors. Orphaned at three years old, he was adopted by a family in Richmond, Virginia. Poe was a smart and successful but also difficult child, and as a young adult he developed a tense relationship with his foster family. He attended the University of Virginia but dropped out after a year. Poe later began publishing poems and stories, but his drinking and erratic behavior kept him from holding down a steady job, and he moved between cities across the American Northeast. The death of his brother in 1831 greatly affected him. In 1836, Poe married his much-younger cousin, Virginia Clemm, and began to publish chapters of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. He would find more success in the 1840s, especially with his poem “The Raven,” but his continued heavy drinking caused the failure of his magazine, the Broadway Journal, and eventually his death in 1849.

While the events of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket take place far from modern society, the novel’s plot is clearly influenced by the tremendous social transformations that were taking place while Poe was writing it. In the mid-1830s, the United States was rapidly expanding; the Louisiana Purchase had doubled the size of the country, and more settlers were moving west, while along the east coast industry continued to develop as the country became a true global economic powerhouse. At the same time, tensions continued to grow between the slave-owning South and the increasingly industrialized, abolitionist North. The tensions aboard the Grampus clearly mirror those within American society itself. Looking outward, the novel is set at moment when the Age of Discovery was giving way to the Age of Imperialism; while much of the world, especially the oceans, remained unmapped by Europeans (and European colonizers), they had established enough control over the world to turn to economic expansion, with American and British whaling or trading ships like the Grampus and Jane Guy crisscrossing the entire globe in search of valuable resources to extract wealth from.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is a hybrid novel that draws from two extremely popular genres in the early 19th century: the nautical adventure story and the gothic. Poe was inspired by fictional accounts of ocean travels, including Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (which also passes itself off as a real travelogue), Joseph Hart’s Miriam, or The Whale-Fisherman, and Michael Scott’s Tom Cringle’s Log; he also borrowed from newspaper stories and memoirs. Gothic novels that influenced Poe’s novel’s horror-tinged tone include Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Later, Herman Melville would draw on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym for his own whaling novel, Moby-Dick, and cosmic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft would borrow from Poe’s fantastic rendition of Antarctica for his novella At the Mountains of Madness.