Bartleby the Scrivener Herman Melville

Adaptations

• The York Playhouse produced a one-act opera, Bartleby, composed by William Flanagan and James J. Hinton Jr. with a libretto by Edward Albee, from January 1 to February 28, 1961.[21]
• The first filmed adaptation was by the Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation in 1969. It was adapted, produced, and directed by Larry Yust and starred James Westerfield and Patrick Campbell, with Barry Williams of The Brady Bunch fame in a small role.[22] The story has been adapted for film four other times as Bartleby: in 1970, starring Paul Scofield; in France, in 1976, by Maurice Ronet, starring Michel Lonsdale; in 1977, by Israel Horovitz and Michael B Styer for Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting, starring Nicholas Kepros, which was an entry in the 1978 Peabody Awards competition for television; and in 2001, by Jonathan Parker, starring Crispin Glover and David Paymer.
• The BBC Radio 4 adaptation dramatised by Martyn Wade, directed by Cherry Cookson, and broadcast in 2004 stars Adrian Scarborough as Bartleby, Ian Holm as the Lawyer, David Collings as Turkey, and Jonathan Keeble as Nippers.[23]
• In 2009, French author Daniel Pennac read the story on the stage of La Pépinière-Théâtre in Paris.[24]
• The story was adapted for the stage in 2020 by Juhan Ulfsak for Von Krahl Theatre in Estonia as Pigem ei (literal translation: "Rather not").[25]

References to the story

Literature

• Bartleby: La formula della creazione (1993) by Giorgio Agamben and Bartleby, ou la formule by Gilles Deleuze are two philosophical essays reconsidering many of Melville's ideas.
• Abdulrazak Gurnah references Bartleby, the Scrivener throughout his 2001 novel By the Sea. The protagonist Saleh Omar quotes Bartleby's mantra to explain his decision to abstain from speaking English on seeking asylum in the UK.
• Jeff Smith's comic book series Bone features a "rat creature" named Bartleby who declines to partake in the violence and savagery of his feral brethren. The Melville connection is reinforced by the fact that Moby Dick is the series protagonist's favorite novel.

Film and television

• Bartleby (1970 film) is an adaptation of the story.
• In 2001, Crispin Glover starred in a modernized adaptation, Bartleby.[26]
• In 2011, French director Jérémie Carboni made the documentary Bartleby en coulisses around Daniel Pennac's reading of "Bartleby the Scrivener".[24]

Other

• The electronic text archive Bartleby.com is named "after the humble character of its namesake scrivener, or copyist—publishes the classics of literature, nonfiction, and reference free of charge."[27]
• The British newspaper magazine The Economist maintains a column named Bartleby focused on managers trying to understand how to motivate their employees and to empathize with employees who "carry out their bosses' often bewildering orders, even when they would 'prefer not to'."[28]
• The 92nd Street Y presented a livestreamed and on-demand reading of the story by actor Paul Giamatti in November 2020. A December 3, 2020 conversation between Giamatti and Andrew Delbanco is archived on YouTube.[29]