Bartleby, The Scrivener
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First published in 1853, Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener is narrated by a Wall Street lawyer who employs a quiet copyist whose repeated response to requests is the now-famous refusal, “I would prefer not to.” As Bartleby withdraws from the routines of office life, his employer struggles to reconcile commercial practicality with an uneasy sense of responsibility for another human being.
A compact, enigmatic work, the story transforms the modern workplace into a setting for questions about alienation, conscience, labour and the limits of charity. Melville’s spare comedy gradually gives way to something more troubling, leaving the reader uncertain whether Bartleby is resisting an unjust system or revealing its underlying emptiness. Its ambiguity has made the tale a touchstone for literary, philosophical and political readings of modern life.
From the book
“I would prefer not to.”
— Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
On Bartleby the Scrivener
“A story about a thwarted writer.”
— John Gruesser and Travis Montgomery, Poe Studies