After reading an 1836 newspaper account of a shipwreck and its two survivors, Edgar Allan Poe penned his only novel, <i>The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket</i>, the story of a stowaway on a Nantucket whaleship who finds himself enmeshed in the dark side of life at sea: mutiny, cannibalism, savagery&#8212;even death. As Jeffrey Meyers writes in his Introduction: &#8220;[Poe] remains contemporary because he appeals to basic human feelings and expresses universal themes common to all men in all languages: dreams, love, loss; grief, mourning, alienation; terror, revenge, murder; insanity, disease, and death.&#8221; Within the pages of this novel, we encounter nearly all of them.<br><br>This Modern Library Paperback Classic reprints the text of the original 1838 American edition.