Bartleby, the Scrivener
"Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by Herman Melville. The story first appeared, anonymously, in Putnam's Magazine in two parts. The first part appeared in November 1853, with the conclusion published in December 1853. It was reprinted in Melville's The Piazza Tales in 1856 with minor textual alterations. The work is said to have been inspired, in part, by Melville's reading of Emerson, and some have pointed to specific parallels to Emerson's essay, "The Transcendentalist." The story has been adapted twice: once in 1970, starring Paul Scofield, and again in 2001, starring Crispin Glover.
Stats for nerds
14recommend
22mentions
22people
2010–2026years
64% recommend32% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I think one of the beautiful things about America is its formation as a country contains so many nations, and in a way America’s cultural history is inseparable from those nations it contains (newly formed) extensions of. America is a young country made from the offshoots of old countries. So in some ways, I think America’s Homer can simply be Homer, just as America’s Shakespeare can be - if an American chooses - Shakespeare. That’s a beautiful idea for a nation.
To think about the question less evasively, for me, it depends on which aspect of Homer is primary. I’m restricting myself here to widely read texts which I think have had vast impact on national character.
If it’s the idea of suffering, frontier, and the impossible but attempted journey, I find it hard to look beyond Melville. Not just for Moby Dick, but I would argue Bartleby, the Scrivener is an incredibly prophetic work about how regular people would come to experience the deep strangeness of modern American life.
If it’s a question of language - of how we write and speak to each other - so much of American language rests on Hemingway. This answer is unavoidable for me. In American communication, so much value is placed on clarity, and brevity, and the idea of “cool”.
If it’s Homer as an epic, sweet, sad, narratively-loose, arguably-multi-authored, and kind-of-orally-told document of American life, widely shared: Why not Homer Simpson? The Simpsons is art at its best, and has clear export and staying power for audiences.
I think the real answer is probably that it’s too early to say. Bob Dylan will probably be on this list in a century - but I think the ways his work is prophetic of future art and the broader future world have not quite formed into reality yet.
Scott Fitzgerald might be there if America’s 21st century experience is so defined by striving, (self) deception, and startlingly violent tragedy as its 20th century was.
Similarly, if America stays as strange and psychedelic and new as it has been in the 20th century, a case could be made for H P Lovecraft.
While I don’t personally enjoy Lovecraft’s prose, his ideas are increasingly prescient. In the 20th century, Americans walked on the moon. In the 21st, Americans have invented - in the consumer LLM - a thing for which the most tractable analogy is Cthulu, with its many-faces of a single entity, its cultists, and its nondeterministic and unknowable - or incomprehensible - non-human motivation or end-point, which can only really be described as a desire for its own momentum.
It may well end up being Lovecraft.
- I mean, middle class menial existences long predate industrialization. Just read Bartleby, the Scrivener.
- - The Harry Potter series. My teacher in school said if I finish my work quickly, I can sit and read whatever I want. I read the Goblet of Fire at least a half a dozen times in 4th grade
- Lord of the Rings, same reason as above
- Life of Pi. The story is so good, the emotions are so real, and the air of absurdity and comedy throughout are so well done
- The Martian, it’s again such a good story and fantasy novel
- Bartleby, the Scrivener. Something about Bartleby as well as his boss spoke to me, as a young professional early in his career. I also loved the imagery of a clerical office in a Manhattan high rise in the 19th century
- Read Bartleby the Scrivener. Or A Christmas Carol.
- you should read bartleby the scrivener by melville.
- Give Bartleby, the Scrivener a read sometime and it'll probably ring a few bells. That's Herman Melville so mid 19th century.
