As Melville conceived the story, the mailbox was an essential symbol: as time passes, the unused mailbox rots and falls apart. He began by writing a story about a young wife named Agatha who waits seventeen years for news from her husband, who left to seek work. In 1852, Melville was asked by Putnam's magazine to contribute a work of short fiction. ' Bartleby the Scrivener' is now one of the most famous short stories of the nineteenth century. ' Bartleby the Scrivener' is also the story of failed communication, and of the impossibility of connection between human beings. Benito Cereno also ends with a classic moment of failed communication, as the tormented slave ship captain is utterly unable to convey to his rescuer the vital truth that has destroyed him. In the novella Billy Budd, Melville's second most famous work, a young man's speech impediment makes it impossible for him to defend his innocence. Not surprisingly, Melville's writing after Moby-Dick is often preoccupied with the question of communication.

It would be decades after Melville's death before the power of his work was recognized. But Moby-Dick failed in its own time, slammed by critics and spurned by readers Melville's truths were too hard to hear. Still a young writer, he had crafted one of the most incredibly dense and imaginative works in all of literature, a book now praised by many as the greatest novel in English. Melville finished his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, when he was all of thirty-two years old.

Bartleby the scrivener characters