Bartleby the Scrivener, A Story of Wall Street

by Herman Melville

Overview

"Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story from 1852 by Herman Melville. Bartleby is hired to work as a scrivener alongside two other clerks, Nippers and Turkey, for an unnamed, elderly lawyer in New York. At first, he produces high-quality work but suddenly his work ethic takes a turn, and Bartleby reply to every task he is given becomes "I would prefer not to." The story was in part inspired by Emerson’s essay "The Transcendentalist" and has been adapted to film twice: once in 1970, starring Paul Scofield, and again in 2001, starring Crispin Glover. Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American writer, best known for his whaling novel, ‘Moby-Dick; or, The Whale’ (1851), which was poorly received at the time but is considered a classic today. Melville, along with authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, was part of the American Renaissance, a literary movement that aimed to provide literature for the American democracy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788726552683
Publisher:	Saga Egmont International
Publication date:	04/18/2022
Sold by:	De Marque
Format:	eBook
Pages:	34
File size:	284 KB

About the Author

Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachussetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick.

Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.

Date of Birth:

August 1, 1819

Date of Death:

September 28, 1891

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

Attended the Albany Academy in Albany, New York, until age 15