For the New York Review of Books, Marilynne Robinson considers the place of Edgar Allen Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, within the author’s prolific career. In addition to comparing Pym to other maritime novels, including Moby-Dick, Robinson argues that labeling Poe as a writer of “horror” overlooks the range and depth of his work.
He has always been reviled or celebrated for the absence of moral content in his work, despite the fact that these tales are all straightforward moral parables. For a writer so intrigued by the operations of the mind as Poe was, an interest in conscience leads to an interest in concealment and self-deception, things that are secretive and highly individual and at the same time so universal that they shape civilizations.
