Reading Groups

In Short: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” with Sheridan Hay

Thursday, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT February 6, 2025

The Center for Fiction

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This single-session group is held in person at The Center for Fiction. Registration includes a complimentary drink from our Café & Bar.

The ‘With Book’ option includes the title required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore. A PDF copy will also be emailed to all registrants.

“I would prefer not to,” Bartleby’s famous injunction, has haunted the imagination of readers since the story’s 1853 publication in Putnam’s magazine. Who is Bartleby? Why does he exert such a profound influence over the lawyer who employs him as a copyist and even subsequently over the history of fiction?

A masterpiece of the short form, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is perhaps the most famous American short story of the nineteenth century. Best remembered for its strangeness, its labile interpretability, and for Bartleby’s implacable, mysterious utterance—possibly the most enigmatic in all American literature—“Bartleby” is a work of “austere minimalism, of philosophical quietism, of radical literary shape, of consummate despair, and withal beautiful in the perfection of the telling,” writes Elizabeth Hardwick. It is like no other American short story, certainly none contemporary to Melville, and has more in common with the work of Dostoevsky or Gogol. (“Bartleby” is cited as an influence on writers from Kafka to Camus).

Critic Newton Arvin asks, referring to the effect of the story’s wildness and terror: “Is the setting of ‘Bartleby’ a Wall Street law office or the cosmic madhouse?” For that matter, is “Bartleby” a story about writing, about reading, about labor, copying, originality, capitalism? Is it about will, individual agency, societal obligation, abandonment, or sanity? Let’s talk about it together.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Herman Melville. A PDF of the story will be provided to all participants and the text can also be purchased here.

What to expect from this reading group: This 90-minute session will begin with an overview of the historical, biographical, and literary context of the novella. A group discussion, in which we turn to the text to cite specific examples and respond to questions and comments, will follow.

Capacity: 25

Led by

Sheridan Hay

Sheridan Hay

Sheridan Hay holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday/Anchor, 2006), which features a lost novel by Herman Melville, was a Book Sense Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover selection, shortlisted for the Border’s Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impact Award. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, foreign rights have been sold in fourteen countries. Sheridan has led The Center’s Moby Dick reading group many times, as well as the popular Henry James group.

About this series

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