“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853) is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December editions of Putnam’s Magazine, and reprinted with minor textual alterations in his The Piazza Tales in 1856. The narrator, an elderly, unnamed Manhattan lawyer with a comfortable business, relates the story of the strangest man he has known: Bartleby.
“I WOULD PREFER NOT TO.” is the phrase, many will recall, comes from Herman Melville’s 1853 story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street,” this cryptic narrative traces the sad fate of a passive-aggressive writer who refuses to vacate the offices of a corporate lawyer. Bartleby was the first laid-off worker to Occupy Wall Street.
External Links:
- Occupy Wall Street’s Debt to Melville where the popular phrase, adopted by the Occupy movement, comes from: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/occupy-wall-streets-debt-to-melville/256482/