“My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.”
In his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Edgar Allan Poe carries his knack for the mysterious and macabre, spilt blood and cryptic messages onto the South Seas. Aboard a whaling ship, stowaway Pym will endure starvation, cannibalism, whirlpools, mad dogs and premature burials on a journey toward the frozen expanse of Antarctica.
Published the year full emancipation was legalized by the UK’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, Arthur Gordon Pym captures the relentless anxiety and violence of pre-Civil War American expansion. Allegorical, tragic, and based on real events, this adventure story went on to inspire many authors from Herman Melville and Jules Verne, to H.G. Wells and Vladmir Nabokov. This edition also includes accompanying selected letters, essays, and criticism from Poe himself.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was a Boston-born American writer, editor, poet, and literary critic credited with pioneering the short story genre, inventing detective fiction, and contributing to the development of science fiction. Known primarily for his haunting poetry and short stories, Poe continues to stand as a central figure of Romanticism in American literature. He died in Baltimore under mysterious circumstances. Nathan Wolff is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at Tufts University. He is the author of Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age (Oxford University Press, 2019), which provides a literary prehistory of today's emotional politics: the cynicism and exhaustion of democratic life in an age of inequality and corruption. His writing has appeared in American Literary History, English Literary History, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and The Washington Post. Joseph Rezek received his PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his B. A. from Columbia University. His area of expertise is British and American literature from 1750 to 1850, and his research focuses on early Black Atlantic literature, transatlantic studies, and the history of race and racism. He teaches at Boston University. Allison Miriam Smith is a co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. She is also an Acquiring Editor and Publishing & Publicity Manager for Unnamed Press. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she was an assistant curator for the USC Doheny Library George Cassady Lewis Carroll Special Collection. She later went on to earn a Masters in 18th & 19th c. Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, working nights at the library. Before Unnamed Press, she was a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA. Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Minor Black Figures, The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is an Acquiring Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. He lives in NYC.
