Volume 28, Number 12 · July 16, 1981
Bartleby and Manhattan
By Elizabeth Hardwick
While preparing some lectures on the subject of New York City, that is, the present landscape in which an astonishing number of people still live, sustaining as they do the numerical sensationalism that qualifies New York as one of the great cities of the world, if not the greatest, the orotund greatest being reserved with an almost Biblical authority for our country as a whole; and also on 'old New York,' with its intimidating claim to vanished manners and social dominion, its hereditary furnishings of aggressive simplicity and shy opulence which would prove an unsteady bulwark against the flooding of the nouveau riche—during this reading I thought to look again at Melville's story, 'Bartleby, the Scrivener,' because it carried the subtitle: 'A Story of Wall Street.'
Feature, 4539 words
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