Bartleby the Scrivener, Billy Budd, and I and My Chimney

Bartleby the Scrivener, Billy Budd, and I and My Chimney
by Herman Melville

Bartleby the Scrivener
The narrator of the story is an unnamed lawyer with offices on Wall Street in New York City. He describes himself as doing "a snug business among rich men's bonds and mortgages and title-deeds." He has three employees: "First, Turkey; second, Nippers; third, Ginger Nut," each of whom is described. Turkey and Nippers are copyists or scriveners while Ginger Nut does delivery work or other assorted jobs around the office, and the lawyer decides his business needs a third scrivener. Bartleby responds to his advertisement and arrives at the office, "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!"

Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative
Billy Budd is a novella begun around 1886 by Herman Melville, whose death in 1891 left the novel well-advanced but unfinished. The work was first published in 1924, posthumously. The work has been central to Melville scholarship since it was discovered in manuscript among Melville's papers in 1924.