Herman Melville: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1819 to 1891
Quick answer: Herman Melville as a story writer: "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", the narrator who cannot see, and what his magazine fiction of the 1850s teaches.
Quick facts
- Born: 1819, New York City
- Died: 1891, New York City, aged 72
- Wrote in: English
- Known for: "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", "The Encantadas"
- Signature move: A comfortable narrator who describes exactly what he fails to understand
- Start with: "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853)
Melville turned to magazine stories in 1853 because the novels had stopped selling, and in three years he produced a handful of pieces that have outlasted most of the books. "Bartleby" alone has generated a small library of interpretation. The stories share a device: a narrator who is reasonable, decent, well fed and unable to see what is in front of him.
What he actually does on the page
He gives the narration to the man who is missing the point. The lawyer who tells "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) describes himself as safe and prudent, and every act of kindness he performs toward the clerk who will not work is also an act of self-protection: he offers money, he offers to have Bartleby live with him, he moves offices rather than confront him. Melville never contradicts the lawyer. He lets the man's own sentences show the reader the gap between charity and comfort.
He makes the reader share a blindness and then removes it. In "Benito Cereno" (1855) Captain Delano boards a Spanish slave ship and spends a long afternoon puzzled by the captain's nerves and the devoted attentions of his servant Babo. The reader sees through Delano's eyes and shares his misreading; the truth, that the enslaved have taken the ship, arrives in one leap. The legal deposition that follows re-tells the same day in flat prose, so you can measure exactly what the genial narrator failed to notice.
He lets refusal be a character. Bartleby's formula, "I would prefer not to", never changes and never explains itself. Melville understood that a story could be driven by a single unmoving figure if everyone around him is forced to move.
The signature move
The blind narrator is dissected best in the last pages of "Bartleby". The lawyer visits the clerk in the Tombs prison, finds him lying in the yard, and afterward passes on a rumour that Bartleby once worked in the Dead Letter Office, handling letters to people who had died. The lawyer offers this as an explanation and it explains nothing; the reader has spent thirty pages watching a man's need go unanswered and knows the cause lies closer to home. Melville's method is to give the narrator the last word and make sure it is the wrong one. The reader's judgement forms in the space the narrator leaves.
Stories to read first
Six pieces, all from the 1850s.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the stories.
What not to copy
Melville's sentences are magnificent and very long, with clauses that pile up like cargo, and imitating them produces prose no editor will accept from a living writer. The allegory can also grow so heavy that characters become ideas with hats on. Take the narrator who cannot see and the still figure at the centre; leave the Victorian syntax.
Life at a glance
- 1819: Born in New York City; the family's fortunes collapse when he is a boy
- 1841: Sails on the whaler Acushnet; deserts in the Marquesas the following year
- 1851: Moby-Dick, dedicated to Hawthorne, is largely ignored
- 1853: "Bartleby, the Scrivener" appears anonymously in Putnam's Monthly
- 1855: "Benito Cereno" serialised in Putnam's
- 1856: The Piazza Tales collects the magazine stories
- 1866: Takes a post as customs inspector on the New York docks and holds it for nineteen years
- 1891: Dies almost forgotten; Billy Budd is found in manuscript and published in 1924
What writers can take from this
- Give the story to the person who understands it least.
- Let a repeated line stand in for a whole character.
- Follow a warm scene with a cold document about the same events.
- Let the narrator's last explanation be visibly inadequate.
- Keep the strange figure silent; the talkers will do the work.
Try it yourself
A manager writes an account of an employee who, one Monday, stopped doing one specific task and would not say why. Write the account in under 1,000 words. The manager must believe they behaved generously throughout. The reader must see, by the end, exactly what the manager never asked.
Questions
What is Herman Melville's best short story?
"Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) is universally ranked first. "Benito Cereno" (1855) is the other masterpiece, and the late novella Billy Budd is often read alongside them.
How did Melville influence the short story?
"Bartleby" became the model for fiction about refusal and about the limits of a reasonable narrator; Kafka's admirers, Camus and Borges all claimed it. "Benito Cereno" is a founding text for the unreliable point of view.
Is Melville hard to read?
The sentences are long and ornate, but "Bartleby" is short and its plot is simple, so it is the right place to begin. "Benito Cereno" rewards a second reading once you know the secret.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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