Bartleby is a short story first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam’s Magazine, and reprinted with minor textual alterations in Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales in 1856. In the story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copy or do any other task required of him, with the words ‘I would prefer not to’. The lawyer cannot bring himself to remove Bartleby from his premises, and decides instead to move his office, but the new proprietor removes Bartleby to prison, where he perishes.
Numerous critical essays have been published on the story, which scholar Robert Milder describes as ‘unquestionably the masterpiece of the short fiction’ in the Melville canon.
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