This character was created by Edgar Allan Poe; and "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" (1838) is his only complete novel, and one of the most translated of Poe's works. It is the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures further south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue towards the South Pole. Precisely because of the abrupt end, several authors have attempted at sequels. The two most famous, that we include in this volume, are the ones by Jules Verne and Charles Dake.

This novel is an informal sequel, the 1899 novel A Strange Discovery by Charles Romeyn Dake. Here, the narrator, Doctor Bainbridge, recounts the story his patient Dirk Peters told him of his journey with Gordon Pym in Antarctica, including a discussion of Poe's poem "The Raven".