Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Bartleby, the Scrivener (Heathen Short)

Bartleby, the Scrivener (Heathen Short)

Melville, Herman

Paperback

General Fiction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798900750125
Publisher: Heathen Shorts
Published: Jan 16 2026
Pages: 60
Weight: 0.18
Height: 0.14 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American author and poet of the American Renaissance period. In 1853, he serialized his short story Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street in two parts in Putnam's Magazine, then collected it in his 1856 work The Piazza Tales. As the story comes into focus, Bartleby arrives as a cipher - silent, spectral, and slipping out of register with the world around him. His famous refrain, I would prefer not to, signals his slow withdrawal from the balance of meaning. As the narrative sharpens, Bartleby blurs: fading into abstraction, refusal, and a slow bankruptcy of being. Melville's tale is not merely a Wall Street satire but a lament for a soul lost within it. Long before the phrase quiet quitting entered the lexicon, Melville summoned its phantom: a man who performs the minimum, then less, then nothing, until even his presence becomes a kind of absence - a man who disappears without leaving. Bartleby does not rage against the machine; he simply ceases to turn its gears. In this, Bartleby is not a relic but a prophecy: the ghost we've become - clocked in, tuned out, and complicit in our own erasure.

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