Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet whose work has become central to the study of nineteenth-century American literature. Born in New York City, Melville first drew on his own experience at sea in books such as Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket, gaining early popularity as a writer of maritime adventure and travel. With Moby-Dick, first published in 1851, he created one of the great works of world literature: a vast, symbolic, experimental novel of obsession, metaphysics, labour, violence, nature, and the American imagination.Although Melville's reputation declined during his lifetime, later readers and critics restored him to the front rank of American writers. His shorter fiction, including "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno," shows the same depth of moral and philosophical pressure found in his longer works, but in a more compressed form. "Bartleby, the Scrivener," first published in 1853, remains one of his most famous and frequently taught works, admired for its mystery, restraint, irony, and unsettling portrait of a man who resists the demands of the world by withdrawing from them. Britannica identifies the full title as Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street and notes its original publication in 1853.
