Bartleby, the Scrivener

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in Putnam's Magazine in November and December 1853 and later collected in his 1856 volume The Piazza Tales. It is narrated by an elderly Wall Street lawyer who hires a new copyist, Bartleby, to handle the office's legal documents; Bartleby works diligently at first, but soon begins refusing every request made of him, professional or personal, with the same quiet, unexplained phrase, I would prefer not to. As Bartleby's refusals extend to all work and eventually to leaving the office at all, the narrator finds himself unable either to fire him or to make sense of his behavior, and the story ends with Bartleby, evicted and starving, dying alone in prison after being arrested as a vagrant, the narrator left only with a rumor that Bartleby had once worked in a dead letter office. The scholar Robert Milder has called it unquestionably the masterpiece of Melville's short fiction, and the story, listed by the BBC in 2019 among the 100 most influential novels, is regarded as a foundational and deliberately ambiguous meditation on urban alienation, passive resistance, and the limits of human sympathy and understanding.