β Scribed by Herman Melville
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Although most people do not think of Herman Melville as a particularly funny writer, his "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and The Confidence Man have kept readers laughing for a century and a half.
"Bartleby" is a simultaneously accurate and absurd depiction of life in a Wall Street office in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is the gentle comedy of a boss' helpless inability to control a stubborn employee, who when asked to do ordinary chores around the office simply responds, "I prefer not to."
In The Confidence Man, Melville skewers the hypocrisies and inadequacies of America and Western civilization through ridicule. His biting satire leaves many readers smirking until the moment when they recognize someone remarkably like themselves as the next target in the con man's sights.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
Herman Melville wrote Bartleby the Scrivener as an emotional response to the fact that his masterpiece Moby-Dick was not selling as well as he had expected. 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 ess
"I prefer not to," he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared. Academics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world'even those daunted by Moby-Dick'Bartleby the Scrivener is simply one of the most absorbing and moving novellas ever. Set in the mid-19th centur
Onboard the Fidèle, a steamboat floating down the Mississippi to New Orleans, a confidence man sets out to defraud his fellow passengers. In quick succession he assumes numerous guises - from a legless beggar and a worldly businessman to a collector for charitable causes and a 'cosmopolitan' gentlem
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