Herman Melville's Bartleby, The Scrivener is one of the most haunting and unforgettable short works in American literature.
In a Wall Street law office, a quiet copyist named Bartleby is hired by a respectable lawyer who expects diligence, obedience, and ordinary clerical routine. At first Bartleby works with unusual intensity. Then, when asked to examine a document, he answers with the now-famous words: "I would prefer not to." From that simple refusal, Melville builds one of the strangest and most powerful studies of work, isolation, charity, resistance, and human incomprehensibility in nineteenth-century fiction.
First published anonymously in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in 1853 and later included in The Piazza Tales, Bartleby, The Scrivener has become one of Melville's most widely read works after Moby-Dick. Its setting in the financial and legal world of Wall Street gives the story lasting force: Bartleby's silent resistance unfolds inside a system built on copying, compliance, property, paperwork, and profit. The result is at once comic, disturbing, philosophical, and deeply sad.
This SMK edition is especially strong as a compact classroom text, a classic American short story, and a sharp literary entry point for readers interested in Herman Melville, Wall Street fiction, workplace alienation, passive resistance, and the darker side of modern office life.