Difficulty in finding literary success early in his short story-writing career inspired Poe to pursue writing a longer work. A few serialized installments of "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" were first published in the "Southern Literary Messenger", though never completed. The full novel was published in July 1838 in two volumes. Some critics responded negatively to the work for being too gruesome and for cribbing heavily from other works, while others praised its exciting adventures. Poe himself later called it "a very silly book". In the years since its publication, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" became an influential work, notably for Herman Melville and Jules Verne.