The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
A young man stows away on a whaling ship, survives a mutiny, a storm and a shipwreck, and ends up drifting toward the South Pole. Poe's only novel is presented as a true account, with a preface insisting on its authenticity, and the hoax is part of the design.
The middle section, in which the survivors are reduced to cannibalism, is genuinely disturbing, and the ending simply stops. Poe was more interested in atmosphere than in resolution, and the novel's influence on later sea fiction and on Melville is out of proportion to its quality. Read it as an experiment.
Public-domain status
First published in 1838. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849, so this work has been free to republish there since 1920.
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