"Es lunes, aunque no importa –podría ser cualquier otro día laborable–. El abogado y propietario de la oficina, por el bien de todos, designa a cada uno de sus subalternos las tareas que hay que resolver. Tres sencillas palabras, pronunciadas por el último empleado contratado, harán que, desde esos despachos, el mundo comience a tambalearse. Con su «preferiría no hacerlo», Bartleby deja perplejo a todo aquel incapaz de ver más allá de...

The Confidence Man (1857) is a novel by American writer Herman Melville. After the failure of his novels Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville struggled to find a publisher who would accept his work. When it was published, The Confidence Man was seen as a flawed, unnecessarily complicated novel, and beyond several collections of poetry, it all but ended Melville's career as a professional writer. When Melville's work was...

Chosen for inclusion in William Evans Burton's Cyclopediae of Wit and Humor of 1857, with an illustration by Henry Louis Stephens, "The Lightning-Rod Man" was the one Melville tale to be available throughout his lifetime, thanks to reissues of this volume. More a parable than a character-driven story, The Lightning-rod man is a charlatan who tries to profit by selling fearful people lightning rods during thunderstorms. The narrator has a difficult...

White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War is the fifth book by American writer Herman Melville, first published in London in 1850. The book is based on the author's fourteen months' service in the United States Navy, aboard the frigate USS Neversink (actually USS United States). The novel takes its title from the outer garment that the eponymous main character fashions for himself on board ship, with materials at hand, being in need of a coat sufficient...