Herman Melville

The narrator, an elderly, unnamed Manhattan lawyer with a comfortable business, already employs two scriveners to copy legal documents by hand, Nippers and Turkey. An increase in business leads him to advertise for a third, and he hires the forlorn-looking Bartleby in the hope that his calmness will soothe the irascible temperaments of the other two. At first, Bartleby produces a large volume of high-quality work. But one day, when asked to help proofread a document, Bartleby answers with what soon becomes his perpetual response to every request: "I would prefer not to." To the dismay of the lawyer and to the irritation of the other employees, Bartleby performs fewer and fewer tasks, and eventually none. The narrator makes several futile attempts to reason with him and to learn something about him; and when he stops by the office unexpectedly, he discovers that Bartleby has started living there. Tension builds as business associates wonder why Bartleby is always there. Sensing the threat to his reputation but emotionally unable to evict Bartleby, the narrator moves his business out. Soon the new tenants come to ask for help: Bartleby still will not leave-he now sits on the stairs all day and sleeps in the building's doorway. The narrator visits him and attempts to reason with him, and surprises even himself by inviting Bartleby to come live with him. But Bartleby "would prefer not to". Later the narrator returns to find that Bartleby has been forcibly removed and imprisoned in the Tombs. The narrator visits him. Finding Bartleby glummer than usual, he bribes a turnkey to make sure Bartleby gets enough food. But when he returns a few days later Bartleby has died of starvation, having preferred not to eat. Some time afterward, the narrator hears a rumor that Bartleby had worked in a dead letter office, and reflects that dead letters would have made anyone of Bartleby's temperament sink into an even darker gloom. The story closes with the narrator's resigned and pained sigh, "Ah Bartleby Ah humanity "

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'Though best-known for his epic masterpiece Moby-Dick, Herman Melville also left a body of short stories arguably unmatched in American fiction. In the sorrowful tragedy of Billy Budd,Sailor; the controlled rage of Benito Cereno; and the tantalizing enigma of Bartleby, the Scrivener; Melville reveals himself as a singular storyteller of tremendous range and compelling power. In these stories, Melville cuts to the heart of race, class, capitalism, and globalism in America, deftly navigating political and social issues that resonate as clearly in our time as they did in Melville's. Also including The Piazza Tales in full, this collection demonstrates why Melville stands not only among the greatest writers of the nineteenth century, but also as one of our greatest contemporaries. This Penguin Classics edition features the Reading Text of Billy Budd, Sailor, as edited from a genetic study of the manuscript by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry text of The Piazza Tales.

In this classic of travel and adventure literature, Herman Melville drew upon his adventures in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands as a prisoner of the Typee people. Like the novel's narrator, Melville jumped ship from a whaling vessel and was held in benign captivity by an indigenous tribe with a reputation for ferocity and cannibalism. His startling and romantic glimpses of native peoples and their customs thrilled Victorian readers, making this the most popular of Melville's books in its day. The study of a culture that both impressed and alarmed the author, this 1846 narrative is also the exciting story of a stranded sailor's attempts to escape from an idyllic but ultimately stultifying existence. Melville's book enjoyed a reputation as a reliable source of firsthand anthropological lore for decades before his use of poetic license came to light. Nevertheless, modern readers appreciate the tale as an intriguing mix of experience and imagination, a combination that enlivened and informed Melville's other works.

Redburn: His First Voyage is the fourth book by the American writer Herman Melville, first published in London in 1849. The book is semi-autobiographical and recounts the adventures of a refined youth among coarse and brutal sailors and the seedier areas of Liverpool. Melville wrote Redburn in less than ten weeks. While one scholar describes it as "arguably his funniest work,"scholar F. O. Matthiessen calls it "the most moving of its author's books before Moby-Dick".