Accordingto Wikipedia: Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street is a novella by the American novelist Herman Melville (1819–1891). It first appeared anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 editions of Putnam's Magazine, and was reprinted with minor textual alterations in his The Piazza Tales in 1856. Herman Melville wrote the story as an emotional response to the fact that Pierre was published to bad reviews. Christopher Sten writes in Bartleby, the Transcendentalist: Melville's Dead Letter to Emerson Melville found inspiration in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays, particularly The Transcendentalist which shows parallels to Bartleby. Bartleby is a kind of clerk, a copyist, who obstinately refuses to go on doing the sort of writing demanded of him. During the spring of 1851, Melville felt similarly about his work on Moby Dick. Thus, Bartleby can be seen to represent Melville's frustration with his own situation as a writer, and the story itself is "about a writer that forsakes conventional modes because of an irresistible preoccupation with the most baffling philosophical questions... Though no great success at the time of publication, Bartleby the Scrivener is now among the most noted of American short stories.