"The problem of Poe's place in American culture cannot be settled canonically, since, unlike the works of Melville or Hawthorne, Poe's texts have not been primarily transmitted through the schools. In
After reading an 1836 newspaper account of a shipwreck and its two survivors, Edgar Allan Poe penned his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the story of a stowaway on a Nant
